Arabic translations of the English adjective 'necessary': a corpus-driven lexical study

Abstract

Modal adjectives of non-epistemic necessity are very common in language corpora. However, such adjectives are expected to behave differently in context, and thus differences between them should be highlighted in dictionaries. Nevertheless, there are a few studies that have examined modal adjectives with respect to their associated constructions and meanings in English. More importantly, studies on equivalent Arabic modal adjectives are scarce. Hence, the present study is quantitative and corpus-driven utilizing monolingual (i.e., the arTenTen18 and the enTenTen18) and parallel (i.e., Open Parallel Corpus or OPUS for short) corpora. Further, it is based on construction grammar and frame semantics to explore Arabic and English words of necessity. Using distinctive collexeme analysis, covarying-collexeme analysis, and LogDice as an association measure, the results reveal that the English necessary has various senses but occurs more significantly in predicative and extradosed constructions. Further, the Arabic words ḍarūrī and lāzim are more associated with necessary as translations, and each is commonly used in a unique construction to evoke certain semantic frames. More specifically, the word ḍarūrī associates with the extraposed construction to evoke semantic frames of cognitive processes, while the word lāzim is attracted to attributive constructions with nouns denoting procedures and intentional acts. They are considered to be cognitive synonyms, and hence they do not alter the truth value of the expressed proposition, and they have at least one sense in common. Based on such results, it is recommended that lexicographers exploit monolingual and parallel corpora for the purpose of creating more accurate dictionaries.