My dissertation was completed in 2004 at Emory University under the guidance of my advisor Richard Martin, Gordon Newby, Devin Stewart, and Vernon Robbins. It has now been superseded by my much more comprehensive book The Formation of Islamic Hermeneutics, but a few scholars may still find value in the more extensive documentation the dissertation provides in some long footnotes.

David R. Vishanoff. “Early Islamic Hermeneutics: Language, Speech, and Meaning in Preclassical Legal Theory.” Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 2004.

Here is a pdf of the dissertation, which I believe still accurately reflects the formatting and layout of the original. A scanned copy of the original, made by University Microfilms International, is available through many libraries or directly from Proquest here.