A Comparative Analysis of The Arabic and English Verb Systems Using the Qur’an Arabic Corpus [A corpus-based study]

Abstract

This thesis explores the Classical Arabic verb system as it appears in the Qur’an and seven of its English translations. Research on tense and aspect morpho-syntactic features of the Classical Arabic verb in the Qur’an and its representation in the renderings of the Qur’an into English from a corpus-based perspective is a prominent area of research in both Arabic linguistics and translation studies, yet it has not been explored in detail in the previous literature (Eisele, 1990; Gadalla, 2006). Tense refers to the time at which an action happened, and aspect expresses whether the action is complete, repeated, or continuous. The definition is taken from [https://dictionary.cambridge.org]. The present study explores the Classical Arabic verb aspect in the Qur’an and investigates its translation in English tense and aspect. The rationale for focusing on the Qur’an lies in its stylistic uniqueness, the fact that it is a closed corpus, and that it is the source of Classical and Modern Standard Arabic grammar. Firstly, it uses a corpus-based method and a compiled corpus from the Qur’anic Arabic Corpus (QAC), which is composed of the occurrences of the Arabic verb in the Qur’an, to identify the functions of the aspect of the Classical Arabic verb. It then uses a contrastive approach to compare the use of the verb when indicating tense and aspect, as seen in the English translations. In the first step, a qualitative analysis was conducted through a close reading of the data to determine the features of the Arabic verb aspect. Then, quantitative data analysis was employed via SPSS and Kappa in SPSS to investigate the differences between the Arabic and English verbal systems in their indication of tense and aspect, and to find out what are the main strategies should be considered by translators in the translating of tense and aspect. After that, data mining using Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) software was applied in an experiment to quantitatively classify the English translations of the Arabic verb in the Qur’an. Findings of this research confirm previous claims by scholars (e.g., Gadalla, 2006) that perfect and imperfect aspects in the Classical Arabic verb are usually translated into multiple tenses and aspects in English. The research provides evidence of the effective use of the decision tree function in WEKA as a data analysis tool to analyse the language of the Qur’an. In addition, it offers insights on the challenges of translating the Classical Arabic verb aspect and suggest that translators apply the same method in this research to improve the quality of their translations. Finally, this research provides several linguistic resources that can be used for future corpus-based studies on other translations of the Qur’an.