Connectives in the World Wide Arabic corpus (original) (raw)

Connectives in the World Wide Web Arabic Corpus

2013

: This study analyses the use of connectives in the World Wide Arabic corpus of selected Gulf countries. The corpus was made up of words from selected Arabic sites based on Arabic seed-words which are parallel to English. A quantitative method was employed in analysing the Arabic connectives extracted from the word lists prepared using SketchEngine. The results revealed that connectives, particularly huruf al-jar (prepositions), were on the top ten list for the most frequent words used in all corpora irrespective of country and genre. The study also shows that some of the connectives that are commonly taught in Arabic language classes are not found in the corpus.

THE FUNCTIONS OF THE ARABIC CONNECTIVE FA IN WRITTEN DISCOURSE

30 Years if Arabic and Islamic Studies in Bulgaria ISBN 978-954-07-2867-4, 2008

The current study is an attempt to cover and classify all the uses of the Arabic connective fa in Modern Written Arabic. In regard of the extensive usage of the connective to relate text segments of different complexity, the task can be carried out only against the background of a theory of text organization and coherence. I have used the concept of connectives as markers of different types of coherence relations between text segments. The investigation has been conducted on an extensive corpus of narrative and expository texts in Modern Written Arabic. The results presented here show that the extensive usage of fa is due to its polyfunc-tionality: it is used to mark semantic, pragmatic and thematic relations, and it can introduce the nuclear or the satellite segment in a relation. This polyfunction-ality can be explained by a metaphoric extension based on semantic analogies between the segments in the different types of relations.

Patterns of Lexical Collocation in Arabic

Zeitschrift für Arabische Linguistik, 2015

Collocation is the habitual co-occurrence of words and a manifestation of the idiomatic usage of the language. Lexical collocations are the frequent combination of content words in comparison to the association with grammatical words. Arabic has a wealth of lexical collocations that merits attention and research. This paper investigates Arabic collocations and provides an account of their patterns. It proposes a typology of lexical collocations in Arabic, and discusses their types, structures and restrictions. Issues such as semantic and syntactic features of collocations as well as register will be touched upon. Grammatical collocation, i.e. the association with prepositions and particles, will be addressed only in relation to the main topic of lexical collocation. Corpora of Arabic were used to detect and verify occurrences of collocations.

Pragmatic Functions of English and Arabic Connectives in Selected Novels

International Journal of Linguistics, 2020

This paper contains a contrastive study that reveals connectives from syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discourse analytic perspectives to cover the whole levels and to provide a good deal of information about them. The study then confines to the analysis of the pragmatic functions of these connectives in two novels; an English one by John Steinbeck (East of Eden) and an Arabic one by Naguib Mahfouz (Palace of Desire) [qaṣr ãl shawq]. The study focuses on connectives, their classifications and functions and sheds light on the notion of connectives from four different levels; syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discourse analytic in English and Arabic. Data is analyzed according to Dijk"s (1979) 'pragmatic connectives' as a model. The study proves the following: (1) English and Arabic connectives differ from one level to another except for the syntactic and discourse analytic levels. (2) Connectives in English and Arabic have pragmatic functions, not just semantic lexical meanings. (3) The English and Arabic novels show similarities in the use of "and" where its pragmatic functions are found excessively in both novels. (4) There are certain dissimilarities in the use of connectives in English and Arabic novels, as far as their pragmatic functions are concerned.

Lexemes and Semantic Relations in English and Arabic: A Contrastive Study

International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation, 2020

Communicating via language is an important property of human beings. Usually one does not think of the relations between words. But from linguistic perspective, the words are not single units. They are linked to each other by semantic and formal relations. The focus of this paper is on different lexemes in English and Arabic. So, this research aims to investigate the major errors which EFL students encounter by the misuse of different lexemes. This is achieved through using the elicitation instrument by implementing two tests. A pretest and a posttest for the sixth-grade students. First the students face problems in dealing with homonyms, synonyms, antonyms and homophones as a result of negative interference between the two languages, Arabic and English. After extensive training the students get good results. They are able to overcome the ambiguity of these lexemes. This shows the importance of learning lexemes in both languages as this simplifies the communication and identifies th...

Prepositional Verbs in Arabic: A Corpus-based Study

In this paper, we investigate prepositional verbs in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) with a focus on verbs collocating with the preposition /fi:/ 'in'. We extract the candidates from tagged text corpora of more than 106 million words. We analyze the extracted candidates according to the valency of the construction and the faithfulness of the English translation to the original entries. Results show that the majority of entries require one argument while others require extra optional argument. While most of the translated candidates retain the original preposition, the remaining ones either collocate with a different preposition or do not collocate with prepositions at all. Furthermore, results show that active and passive mismatch is inevitable in translating prepositional verbs. We conclude with proposing a typical entry of prepositional verbs to be followed by Arabic-English learners' dictionaries. At the end of the paper, we share our gold data for further use by teachers, translators and lexicographers who are interested in Arabic. 1

Towards a Proper Evaluation of Al-Hafiz Arabic Collocations Dictionary: A Corpus-based Study

Undoubtedly, collocation has become one of the most controversial linguistic terms of today. As an evidence to this, linguists did not agree up till today as to its exact definition, nor types, nor patterns. This may explain, to some extent, the scarcity of collocational dictionaries and their late appearance regardless of the huge number of collocations that can be found in general (i.e. non-collocational) lexicons and dictionaries of nearly all languages. Added to this is the difficulty of compiling a collocational dictionary unless modern technological tools such as computers, huge corpora, and text analysis software are used. This is true as the first English collocational dictionary appeared in 1986, the BBI, while in Arabic, the first one to appear was Hafiz in 2004 which is the main focus of this paper. This is exactly the reason behind the researcher’s interest in this dictionary as it is already the first of its kind in Arabic as is mentioned by its author on its front cover. Collocational dictionaries are indispensable tools for the translator, writer and learner of any foreign language. One of the reasons behind the errors translators make in rendering collocations from one language to another is that they consult general-purpose bilingual dictionaries that do not provide the translators with detailed explanation or examples of collocations. Hence, the significance of this paper as it represents an attempt towards introducing a modern-technology-based linguistic methodological and academic criticism for evaluating such a great effort aiming at elevating it to the best shape it can be and to help it become a model to be emulated in the field of compiling specialized as well as non-specialized Arabic\English and English\Arabic dictionaries. As the dictionary’s author has committed – according to the researcher – a number of methodological, editorial and translational mistakes; a matter which makes it incumbent upon specialists to look into its content to clarify such mistakes and attempt to amend them whenever possible.

CORPUS ANALYSIS OF CONJUNCTIONS: ARABIC LEARNERS' DIFFICULTIES WITH COLLOCATIONS

This paper examines Arabic majors use of conjunctions in their essays both in the application (qualitative) and frequency of conjunctions used (quantitative). The essays serve as a corpus for this study where conjunctive use and misuse among learners of Arabic are described and how certain combinations of words are preferred. Sketch Engine was employed to track the frequency of conjunctions used and to identify the concordance lines of Arabic conjunctions and the collocates. A simple frequency counts reveals that out of more than 83 conjunctions available in Arabic, only 48 were used and the rest 35 were not employed at all by the students. However, the use was not necessarily correct. There seemed to be a confusion in the application of these conjunctions, particularly those which carry similar meanings with the ones in L1. Another problem with its usage lies in the use of collocations; where translation of L1 was applied to the Arabic conjunctions. Mother tongue interference could be the reason for the confusion since direct translation of the word can be used in the same context, but the contexts of their applications are different. This study highlights the need to focus on these errors when teaching Arabic to second or foreign language learners.