Arabic Corpus Linguistics by Tony McEnery;Andrew Hardie;

Arabic Corpus Linguistics by Tony McEnery;Andrew Hardie;

Author:Tony McEnery;Andrew Hardie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press


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Semantic Prosody as a Tool for Translating Prepositions in the Holy Quran: A Corpus-Based Analysis

Nagwa Younis

1. Introduction

One of the most challenging aspects of translating the Holy Quran is reflecting the shades of meaning conveyed by the use of certain prepositions in the Arabic text. Prepositions are used in the Holy Quran not only as a syntactic requirement but also for a semantic and rhetorical function. It is the hypothesis of this research that there is a ‘semantic prosody’ related to the use of one preposition versus another in a certain linguistic context. This semantic prosody makes it inaccurate for the translator to make consistent use of the same English word as a translation equivalent for a given verb when the verb is followed by more than one preposition in various linguistic contexts.

The aim of this chapter is twofold, and is hence of importance to the field of corpus-based translation studies in general and to the translation of the Holy Quran in particular. First, this chapter investigates the semantic prosody related to the use of certain prepositions (alā, ‘on’; ilā, ‘to’; and li-, ‘for’) in verb-preposition constructions by examining the collocational patterns in which they occur. This corpus-based analysis will, hopefully, help translators to render the Arabic text into the target language while keeping the same semantic effect conveyed by the original preposition. As we will see, the use of two different prepositions with the same verb may result in two different meanings. This contradicts the notion held by some Arab grammarians, for example the Kufi School, that some prepositions in Arabic can be substituted for one another without a change in meaning (see, for example, Hassan 1974). Second, this chapter analyses the strategies adopted by translators to overcome these problems, with a view to providing translators with insights on dealing with the semantic prosodies of such patterns.

More specifically, the chapter is an attempt to answer the following questions:

1. How are specific semantic prosodies related to the use of certain prepositions in the Holy Quran, especially in verb-preposition constructions?

2. In what way can this be detected through corpus analysis?

3. How can semantic prosody help translators achieve maximum quality by selecting an equivalent that has the nearest shade of meaning to the word in the original text?

The chapter is organised in the following fashion. In section 2, the concept of ‘semantic prosody’ is introduced by surveying it in the domain of corpus linguistics. Attempts to characterise the semantic prosody of prepositions in the Holy Quran, as a special genre, are indicated in section 3 in the light of previous work done by some Arab thinkers. The research method is described in section 4. The Quranic parallel corpus developed by Dukes (2012) will be the major tool used in this study for analysing the translation of prepositions in the Holy Quran, together with consultation of the Quran section of arabiCorpus (Parkinson 2012) to examine broader concordances of some of the verb-preposition constructions in the Holy Quran. Section 5 presents and discusses the results.



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