En algunos países muy religiosos que se critica más por su trabajo con la vida inter dimensional que para el Programa de Prana, ¿por qué crees que es esto?

The linguistic resources and computational tools used in this corpus-based study are employed to produce six datasets to be evaluated for their representation of SP of nature in the Qur’an. These resources and tools with brief descriptions are listed below.

1- http://tanzil.net/

Tanzil.net is a linguistic resource drawn on in this study, namely a website from which

machine-readable versions of the Qur’an as a raw data source can be obtained. It is a part of the Tanzil Project, which consists of the original verses in Arabic as well as 42 manual translations of the entire book. In this research, four of the translations were downloaded as Text documents from this website, except for Haleem’s translation which is not available on the website; hence, was converted from a pdf file into a Text document to apply the same algorithm to it. They were run against Python via NLTK to obtain the statistical analysis of natural phenomena terms. In addition, they were copied into Excel for an alignment task24 _{to find SP in the Qur’an and evaluate its English renderings. Furthermore,}

their versions with the appended Arabic root-disambiguated nature terms and stem- disambiguated translated English nature terms25 _{were run in Sketch Engine}26 _{to produce}

concordance lines for each of the natural phenomena to visually represent the collocational behaviour of these natural terms in context (their SP).27 _{Finally, these versions were run in}

22Bigrams are pairs of words, which can be found using association measurement functions found in the nltk.metrics package (Perkins, 2010, pp.21-3). This research will focus on bigrams and triagrams that are statistically provencollocations; not simply contiguous sequence of words.

23 Association measures (sometimes called collocation measures) are statistical measures that calculate the strength of association between words based on different aspects of the co-occurrence relationship. There are many different association measures, each producing (slightly) different lists of collocates (Evert, 2008; Gabalasova et al., 2017). See also Brezina (2018, pp. 66-71). 24Alignment is a mechanism in corpus linguistics whereby a segment of text in the target text can be identified as the translation of

the segment, or vice versa. This usually requires the two sets of texts to be aligned. Users of parallel corpora are often interested in retrieving instances of lexis or grammatical constructions in the source language together with their translations. (Olohan, 2004, p.198).

25 The corpora were pre-processed via Python and the root- disambiguated forms of the nature terms were appended to the text to explore with accuracy their frequencies, collocations, etc. [See Chapter Four].

26 The word sketch engine evolved from the program Bonito. It is a web-based Concordancing program. The sampler version which can be found at http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/ uses the British National Corpus. It is a leading corpus tool widely used in lexicography. The Sketch Engine website offers many ready-to-use corpora, and tools for users to build, upload and install their own corpora. Available from:[https://www.sketchengine.eu/],[Accessed in October 2016 onwards].

27More on root-based and stem-based disambiguation and the rationale behind applying these processes will be seen in Chapters Two and Four.

LancsBox28 _{to draw the collocational networks and visualise their parallel concordance}

lines of nature in the Qur’an and its translations.

2- https://www.altafsir.com

The Qur’an tafsīrs29 _{in https://www.altafsir.com is another linguistic resource, which is a}

website that is employed as an aid to understanding the meanings of the Qur’an. The website altafsir.com was commissioned by the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic

Thought30 _{in Jordan and developed and maintained by the Integrated Technology Group.}

This is composed of a library of Islamic resources (i.e., old and contemporary works of Islamic theology and Tafsīrs) related to the meanings of the Qur’an, such as Ibn Abbās;31

Ibn Kathīr;32 Tafsīr al-Jalalayn; Asbab Al-Nuzul.33 This library was consulted while conducting the qualitative analysis of this research to determine the two forms of SP (i.e., evaluative and discourse prosodies) of the theme of nature in the Qur’an.

To put it differently, the researcher consulted them to arrive at a sort of consensus on the agreed contextual meanings of occurrences of nature in the Qur’an (prosodies). However, it should be mentioned that out of the resources mentioned here, Tafsīr al-Jalalayn, one of the commentaries of the Qur’an, was chosen as a primary source in the alignment of the parallel corpora for its popularity (as in Hamza, 2008, ii) and simplicity. The choice of

Tafsir al-Jalalayn is purely premised on a linguistic perspective and not as a reflection of

the ideological background of its authors. In practical terms, the preference to use this tafsīr is its linguistic interpretation, where the general method focuses on the meanings of the verses tailored with brief syntactic and morphological explanations. The researcher found this feature especially useful in the alignment of verses of the Qur’an via Microsoft Excel, where each verse is adjacent to its tafsīr both in its Arabic and English versions.

28 LancsBox is a new-generation software package for the analysis of language data and corpora developed at Lancaster University. Available from: [http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox/], [Accessed 04 April 2018 onwards].

29 The word ريسفت tafsīr ‘commentary or interpretation’ is derived from the root رسف fassara ‘to comment or to interpret’. Someone who writes Tafsīr is a رسفم mufassir ‘commentator of Qur’an’. An example of a commentary is Ibn Kathīr’s interpretation of the Qur’an.

30 The Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, established in 1980 by the late H.M. King Hussein of Jordan, is a non-political and international charitable trust based in Jordan comprising of 70 to 100 members of the world’s top Islamic scholars, who meet or correspond on a regular basis. It recognises all seven traditional madhhabs (or legal schools) of Islam. See also [https://www.altafsir.com/aboutfoundation.asp], [Accessed in 15 December 2016 onwards].

31 Attributed to the Companion Abdullah Ibn Abbas (d. 68/687) and Muhammad ibn Ya‘qub al-Firuzabadi (d. 817/1414) and translated into English by Guezzou in 2007, Tanwīr al-Miqbās min Tafsīr Ibn 'Abbāis one of the most pivotal works for understanding the environment which influenced the development of Qur’anic exegesis.

32 Ibn Kathīr, I.1983. TafsīrAl­Qurān. Al-cAẓīm: vols.1-4. Beirut: DarAlqalam.

33 Alī ibn Ahmad al-Wahidi isthe earliest scholar of the branch of the Qur’anic sciences known as Asbāb al-Nuzūl (i.e. the contexts and occasions of the Revelation of the Qur’an). Available from: [https://www.altafsir.com/Books/Asbab%20Al-

Thus, this research not only relies on a web source to find meanings of the Qur’an but also provides a machine-readable commentary of the Qur’an (Verse-by-Verse) to align it in a spreadsheet containing the original verses and their English renderings. This means that the exploration of the meaning of a natural phenomenon term in the qualitative analysis of the Qur’an is immediate, and the congruency of the translations with the Arabic representation is systematic. In any event, the use of this commentary and others is an integral part of determining the following results of this research: the pragmatic functions of natural phenomena in the Qur’an (their discourse prosodies); their connotative colourings (their evaluative prosodies); and in turn the evaluation of the English renderings of SP of natural in the phenomena in the Qur’an (congruency vs divergence).