To the researcher’s knowledge, very little research in the field of corpus-based Qur’anic studies has focused on SP in the Qur’an (Al-Nasser and Khashan, 2008; Al-Ubaidi, 2013; Al- Sofi et al., 2014; and Younis, 2018). It appears that only a few studies were conducted on some lexical items and presented in short articles. For example, Al-Nasser and Khashan
186 Kasra is a diacritic in Arabic, which is a diagonal stroke written below the consonant which precedes it in pronunciation. It represents a short vowel i (like the "i" in English "pit"). See also: [https://web.uvic.ca/hrd/hist455/vowels/vowels_pres.htm]
(2008)
conduct an analysis of the word نيب ُم mubeen ‘clear’ in the Qur’an for its SP. In their study of the different corpus linguistic features of this word, they find that it is semantically prosodic with lexical items of negative evaluation. Therefore, they claim that the most frequent of collocations of mubeen carry a negative connotation; hence, mubeen has a negative SP (See Figure 22).
Figure 22: The SP of the word ني ب ُم mubeen’clear’ in the Qur’an (figure taken from Al- Nasser and Khashan 2008, p.11)
As seen in the figure above, their findings show that the word mubeen occurs 97 times in the Qur’an. Out of these occurrences, it occurs 64 times with connotatively negative items and only eight times with a positive connotation. They report that the negative items are words like وُد ع ʿadūw ‘adversary’, رْح س siḥrun ‘magic’, ل لا ض ḍalāl ‘error’, نا بْعُث ṯuʿbān ‘snake’, ري ذ ن naḏīr‘warner’, etc. The positive collocates, on the other hand, include words
such as ﻝوُس َر rasūl ‘prophet’, روُن nūr ‘light’, رْص ن naṣrun ‘victory’. The remaining 25 word- tokens are of neutral evaluation (connotation): ءْي ش Šaiʾin ‘thing’, ﺏاَتِك Kitābun ‘book’, ﻥاَطْلُس
Sulṭānun ‘authority’, يِب َرَع ʿarabīyun ‘Arabic’, and با ه ش Šihābun ‘comet’ (pp.11-2).
In an article written in Arabic, Al-Ubaidi (2013) investigates the SP of the collocations of four verbs, which are س م massa ‘touch’, قا ذ ḏāqa ‘taste’, ف ش ك kašafa ‘reveal’, and ل زْن َأ
iʾanzalanzala ‘send down’. He finds that the verb ‘sends down’ occurs 62 times and has a positive SP, and collocates with words like Qur’an, angels, the book, sustenance, water, etc. He also finds that the word ‘touch’ occurs 53 times and has a negative SP, because it collocates with words with negative evaluative prosody such as hell, illness, punishment, etc. Similarly, he finds the verb ‘taste’, which occurs 37 times, to have a negative SP
because it collocates with words such as punishment and illness too. Finally, he finds that the verb ‘reveals’ occurs 18 times and has a negative prosody because its collocates are also punishment and illness.
In addition, in the analysis of these verbs, he uses the SP approach in five consecutive steps, which are as follows:
1. Identifying the verbs to be investigated.
2. Making calculations of instances of word use by counting the number of times they appear in the Arabic Qur’anic corpus (frequency).
3. Creating a list of the collocations of each verb and the number of times they occur with it. 4. The movement from the dictionary meaning of the verb to its meaning in the context it occurs
in.
5. Establishing a comparison between the dictionary meanings of the verb with its meaning derived from the contexts it appears in (Al-Ubaidi, 2013, p.93).
Al- Sofi et al. (2014) also present a short paper on the SP of four verbs in the Qur’an which
are س م massa ‘touch’, قا ذ ḏāqa ‘taste’, ف ش ك kašafa ‘reveal’, and ءا ج Ǧāʾa ‘came’.
Their conclusion is summarised as follows:
1. The four verbs under study have negative and positive semantic prosodies, not because they have these attitudes, but rather because they are surrounded by a negative or positive semantic environment (collocates).
2. Context plays an essential role in determining the SP of words.
3. SP is one of the most important semantic issues in the study of text meaning because it uncovers the semantic behaviour of words and the semantic set around these words, which in turn creates harmony and cohesion in the text (p.130).
In a more recent corpus-based study incorporating translations of the Qur’an, Younis (2018) investigates the semantic prosody related to the use of certain prepositions (ىلع 'alā ‘on’;ىلإ 'lā ‘to’; and ـل li ‘for’) in verb-preposition constructions by examining the collocational patterns in which they occur. She examines several verbs, including specific forms of the lemmata187 ب ت ك kataba ‘inscribe or write’, ع م تْسا ’istam'a ‘listened’, ل زْن 'nzala
‘send down’, ر ب ص ṣabar ‘was patient’,ى ح ْو أ 'awḥa ‘reveal’, and ى د هhada ‘guide’. By
187In linguistics, a lemmata is a word considered as its citation form together with all the inflected forms. For example, the lemma go consists of go together with goes, going, went, and gone. Available from:
analysing the concordance lines, the collocates of each verb are identified using the concordance in ArabiCorpus by Parkinson (2012)188 to discover the various levels of
meaning related to each preposition, and the QAC to compare it with parallel corpora of Qur’an translations. Her study uses the corpus-based approach to translation studies by assuming that the concept of semantic prosody can be a tool that raises the level of accuracy when selecting a translation equivalent. She does so by quantifying frequencies and studying the concordance and collocational behaviour of the source word as well as the target word in a corpus of each language (p.139). She does not limit SP to three possibilities, positive/negative/neutral, only, but follows the broader sense of SP as expounded by Sinclair (2004b). For example, she finds that the SP associated with 'alā is “something hard or difficult or done with effort, something that denotes or implies commitment or obligation” (p.140). On the other hand, the SP that seems to be associated with 'lā is “the delivering of something that is usually good”. In addition, the collocates of
li- suggest an SP of “assigning something”; especially in cases where it contrasts with alā, li- often indicates something good or positive. An important implication of her study is that
the “analysis of semantic prosody can help translators achieve the highest possible degree of accuracy” (p.140).
In conclusion, the overview of the studies here showed that not many corpus-based studies have ventured to study extensively the dimensions of nature as a prominent concept in the Qur’an and compare it with its English translations. Moreover, based on the studies above, except for Younis (2018) which employs concordances, none of these studies has applied a corpus-based technique to explore collocations and SP in the Qur’an, and there is no specific mention of the collocation measures and parameters used in any of these studies including Younis (2018). Finally, it appears that the corpus-based study of SP in the Qur’an is still relatively new and only a few short studies were conducted on it; it seems that only one used Natural Language Processing (NLP) or computational methods of any kind. Hence, this research bridges the gap in corpus-based studies on the Quran by covering both SP as a collocational phenomenon and nature as a major theme in the Qur’an.
188ArabiCorpus (arabicorpus.byu.edu) is a medium-sized, plain text corpus of nearly 200 million words, created by Dilworth Parkinson and hosted by Brigham Young University. Though divided into five genres (Newspapers, Modern Literature, Nonfiction, Egyptian Colloquial, and Premodern), the core of the corpus is the Newspapers category—and thus Modern Standard Arabic with an emphasis on media Arabic. This category consists of full-year datasets of newspapers from different regions of the Arab world— including Egypt, Morocco, and Syria—as well as pan-Arab newspapers such as Al-Hayat. The other categories draw from a variety of sources, including modern literature, classical literature, scientific texts, the Qur’an, chats, and plays. (Parkinson, 2012, p.75).