Request Constructions in Classical Arabic versus Modern Arabic: A Corpus-based Study

المجلة: Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies

سنة النشر: 2023

تاريخ النشر: 2023-12-19

The present study aims to investigate the various requestconstructions used in Classical Arabic and Modern Arabic languageby identifying the differences in their usage in these two differentgenres. Also, the study attempts to trace the cases of felicitous andinfelicitous requests in the Arabic language. Methodologically, thecurrent study employs a web-based corpus tool (Sketch Engine) toanalyze different corpora: the first one is Classical Arabic,represented by King Saud University Corpus of Classical Arabic,while the second is The Arabic Web Corpus “arTenTen”representing Modern Arabic. To do so, the study relies on felicityconditions to qualitatively interpret the quantitative data, i.e.,following a mixed mode method. The findings of the present studyshow that request constructions vary in terms of occurrence betweenClassical Arabic and Modern Arabic. In Classical Arabic, (/laa/ ال)of prohibition is the most frequent construction, which is rarely usedin the Web corpus where the command in the form of (/lam/لم +verb) is the most commonly emerging one, which is, in turn, seldomemployed in the former corpus. The vocative (/ya/ ايا) is the secondmost frequent construction in Classical Arabic, whilst theinterrogative (/hel/ هل) emerged in the other genre. The third mostcommon request construction is the interrogative (/hel/ هل) inClassical Arabic, but the vocative (/ya/ يا) is used in Modern Arabic.Nonetheless, some of these constructions fail to accomplish two ormore conditions and hence are regarded as infelicitous requests.Such infelicitous constructions serve other functions than requests,such as negation, exclamation, and sarcasm

A corpus-based stylistic analysis of online suicide notes retrieved from Reddit

المجلة: Cogent Arts & Humanities

سنة النشر: 2022

تاريخ النشر: 2022-03-06

This study examines the stylistic linguistic features of a collection of suicide notes retrieved from the online platform Reddit from the period (2012–2020). It aims to conduct a detailed corpus-based stylistic analysis. Furthermore, it aims at checking specific selected stylistic categories. The quantitative analysis was performed using WordSmith 8.0 software which helps to identify keywords in context. Keywords are indicators of the style of the language of the selected corpus. The analysis result indicated that the redditors in the online suicide corpus usually included simple words with fairly short sentences. Their writings tend to be less lexically diverse, concentrating on one or two themes with a lower TTR (type-token ratio), which indicated that their words were relatively repetitive. Online suicide notes show high frequency in using first-person singular pronouns, and concerning the distribution of content words, the verbs were the most frequently used part of speech, followed by nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. Furthermore, the keywords list helps to reveal stylistic and linguistic elements.