LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 17:9 September 2017
ISSN 1930-2940

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Distribution of Simple Prepositions in Modern Standard Arabic

Mohammed Modhaffer and C.V. Sivaramakrishna

Abstract

This paper aims to reveal the frequency distribution of simple prepositions in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA or Arabic, for short). We investigate multi-genre text corpus of 106,572,775 words. We tag the corpora with our own trained model of Stanford Part of Speech Tagger and we use our own morphological analyzer to separate the prefixes and suffixes from the tagged corpora. Results reveal that 55 prepositions constitute 16.7987% of the total vocabulary of Modern Arabic texts. Every sixth word in Arabic is a preposition. Moreover, the five most commonly used prepositions in Arabic are /li/ ‘for’, /fi:/ ‘in’, /bi/ ‘with, by’ /min/ ‘from’, and /?alaa/ ‘on’; together, they represent 76.5550% of all the occurrences of prepositions and they cover 12.8603% of the total words in the whole corpus.

Keywords: prepositions, distribution, text corpus, Modern Standard Arabic, Semitic languages

1. Introduction

Prepositions constitute one of the core grammatical categories of Arabic vocabulary. Every sixth word in Arabic texts is a preposition. Prepositions are used to indicate several functions such as location, time, relation, instrumentation, cause and effect and so on. For a complete list of the meanings and functions of Arabic prepositions in Classical Arabic (CA) grammatical tradition, see Al Shumasan (1987).

Most of Arabic prepositions are unigram words while some of them are in the form of affixes which can be prefixed into all types of nouns. The aim of this paper is to examine the frequency distribution of simple prepositions in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) text corpora. By “simple” we mean the prepositions which are either prefixes such as /li/ ‘for’ or those which are composed of only one word such as /min/ ‘from’. Complex prepositions such as /bir-ra?mi min/ ‘despite’ fall outside the scope of this paper.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

MOHAMMED MODHAFFER (Corresponding author)
Ph.D. Research Scholar
Department of Linguistics
Kuvempu Institute of Kannada Studies
University of Mysore
Manasagangotri
Mysore – 570006
Karnataka
India
modhaffer@gmail.com
ORCID iD: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7866-418X
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DR. C.V. SIVARAMAKRISHNA (Co-author)
Research Guide
Reader-cum-Research Officer
Central Institute of Indian Languages
Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India
Hunsur Road, Manasagangotri
Mysore – 570006
Karnataka
India
shivaramakrishna1963@gmail.com

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