Dilworth Parkinson and Abdur-Rahman Abou Almajd in dialog around his great efforts in developing a website, arabiCorpus

Dilworth Parkinson and Abdur-Rahman Abou Almajd in dialog around his great efforts in developing a website, arabiCorpus.

We have a fresh opportunity to reflect about developing a website, arabiCorpus. At this point Professor Dilworth Parkinson is going to talk about his views of developing a website and Using Arabic Synonyms. 

Dilworth Parkinson

He is Professor of Arabic at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

He received his MA and PhD in Arabic Linguistics from the University of Michigan, in 1976 and 1982 respectively.

His recent publications include Using Arabic Synonyms, a vocabulary building book for advanced students published in the Cambridge University Press series. The citations are based on a large corpus of newspaper Arabic, and mining them involves the use of some of the corpus tools that he has been developing. More recently, his A Frequency Dictionary of Arabic appeared, published by Routledge, coauthored with Tim Buckwalter. It is based on a new 30 million word balanced corpus or Arabic, including spoken Arabic.

He is currently developing a website, arabiCorpus.byu.edu, which is being designed to allow students and scholars to search large untagged Arabic corpora for words and structures. It provides information on word frequency, citations giving 10 words before and 10 words after, and information on collocates of the word in question. Some regular expression searching is also possible, allowing the user to find larger structures and grammatical patterns.

He has taken charge of BYU's Arabic Study Abroad program in recent years. He took students to Alexandria, Egypt in 2004, to Amman, Jordan in 2009, to Cairo, Egypt in 2010, and back to Amman during Fall Semester of 2011. He will also direct the Fall Semester 2012 program in Amman.

Q: First of all, what made you take up Arabic language?

DP: I started university intending to study the ancient history of the Middle East.  I started taking Arabic as a research language.
However, as I became more immersed in the language, I realized that I was more interested in living people than dead ones, and I realized as well that I had fallen in love with the Arabic language, so I switched my major to modern Arabic linguistics.

Q: How did you find Arabic language?

DP: Arabic was difficult at first, but like any language it gives itself to you with time.  Arabic is very interesting from a linguistic point of view because of the diglossic language situation (where the language of literacy is quite different from the spoken language), the multitude of dialects, and strong role of language attitudes and ideology in determining attitudes towards those varieties.

Q :You're currently developing a website, arabiCorpus.byu.edu,, which is being designed to allow students and scholars to search large untagged Arabic corpora for words and structures, Could you elaborate on that? 

DP: For many native speakers, the most important linguistic question is often: What is correct?  What do the authorities say?  But for modern
linguists, the much more interesting question is: What do native speakers actually do?  What words do they use, and how do they typically combine them to express themselves?  These latter questions are important for dictionary makers and anyone else trying to describe the state of a language at a particular time, but they are even more
important to non-native speaker learners of Arabic.  When a non-native speaker is learning Arabic, he is confronted with long, abstract dictionary definitions that are hard to follow and hard to apply to real-life language use.  A corpus can give both the researcher and the student access to what native speakers actually do, with numerous examples.  Through those examples, they soon figure out the important contexts in which words are typically used, and therefore theconnotations and implied meanings of these words.  With a corpus it is easy to sort examples into different words senses, and it is easy to get an idea of which words and word senses are more common, and which less so.

Q:I wonder how you got the idea to developing a website, arabiCorpus.

DP: Brigham Young University has been a center for Corpus Linguistics for the last several years.  Mark Davies, a professor of Linguistics, has a comprehensive website at corpus.byu.edu, where he brings together corpora for several languages, in addition to very sophisticated tools for searching these corpora.  His new corpus of American English, updated each 10 years, allows researchers to track changes in the language over time.  When I became aware of Professor Davies work with English, Spanish and Portuguese, I realized that although I could not match the sophistication of his tools (since we do not yet have adequate tools to lemmatize Arabic text), I could create a tool that would be enormously useful to scholars and students.  After developing the basics of the tool, students in BYU’s program for Computers in the Humanities helped me design the website and the user interface so that it would be appealing to a non-technical user. 

Q: Your recent publications include Using Arabic Synonyms, Could you elaborate on, please?

DP: Using Arabic Synonyms is a publication based on my corpus work.  It is aimed at learners of Arabic who want to build their vocabulary.  The headwords are chosen to be common words which students are likely to know, and the synonyms are words that are closely related in meaning. The innovation of the book is that it provides two additional things that normal synonym dictionaries do not provide: 1) examples of use, so that students can see not only the similarity in meaning, but also potential differences in use and implication; 2) frequency information: each word is marked as either daily, weekly or monthly, meaning that if the student read an Arabic newspaper every day, he would likely encounter this word either every day, or about once a week, or about once a month.  This information helps the student increase his vocabulary in a 'smart' way, allowing him to easily link related words together, and to have a good idea about which ones he is more likely to encounter in his daily use of Arabic.

Q: Which Arab linguistics do you prefer?

DP: My training and initial research (before I became a corpus linguist) was in the area of Arabic Sociolinguistics, a field which looks at the relationship of language to broader social trends.  My specific research looked at the fusha-colloquial interface, and I also did research examining the degree to which Arabs with varying degrees of education controlled the fusha language.

Q: sure, you must have read Sibawayhi's Kitab, what else you prefer to read from old Arabic books?

DP: Although I have dabbled in the old grammarians (and have included many of them in the corpus), I am not at all an expert in the Arabic grammatical tradition; I have nothing but respect for those who are, but my own research has been informed by the modern, western linguistic tradition.

Q: You took your students to Alexandria, Egypt and to Amman, Jordan, I wonder how they find these cities and people.

DP: My students have loved their experiences in the Arab World.  Egypt is a very friendly country, and it was very easy for my students to find people to talk to and hang out with, which is very important for language development, partly because so much of life there is lived 'on the street'.  This was not so much the case in Jordan, but there we had access to the university campus, and on campus, again, it was easy for my students to find many people to talk to and get to know.
They were invited to homes, fed Arab food, and in general treated very hospitably.  The institutes where we studied made very great efforts,as well, to help our students progress in Arabic. Overall, it was a
wonderful experience.

Q: What is your opinion on the future of Arabic language?

DP: Arabic is a vital, living language.  I completely disagree with those scholars who feel that Arabic is under some kind of threat.  Except in certain Gulf countries, Arabic seems to be thriving and growing.  I believe that we should not worry that Arabic continues to develop, borrowing words here, developing new idioms there, etc.  All languages do this, without losing their basic identity.  Arabic has become, in the last century, a perfectly 'modern' language that is well adapted to the modern world, and with the ability to express contemporary concepts.

I think Arabs should be proud of their linguistic heritage, both fusha AND colloquial, and feel happy that they are heirs to such a delightful linguistic tradition.  I believe that efforts to suppress colloquial and privilege fusha are bound to fail, and that we should spend our efforts making the most of the useful diglossic situation that Arabic finds itself in, rather than futilely trying to change it.

Abdur-Rahman: Shukran very much, friend Dil,

DP: It’s very interesting, I enjoy reading the interview nicely, thank u.

In the year AD  6I 9, not long after the ann