Arabic-L:LING:Arabic demonstratives

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Fri 12 Jan 2010
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject:Arabic demonstratives
2) Subject:Arabic demonstratives

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1)
Date: 12 Jan 2010
From:Waheed Samy <wasamy at umich.edu>
Subject:Arabic demonstratives


Regarding the second question:

"does anyone have any thought on why Arabic, compared to English, uses more demonstratives in written texts? For example, in a corpus of 20,000 words of English there will be say 100 instances of demonstratives, while in a same-size corpus of Arabic, there will be 200 cases if not more. That can't be just due to the fact that Arabic has more lexical forms for the demonstratives, right?"

Concerning the written form of the language, Arabic and English pack syntactic categorical constituents very differently.  Whereas every English word is delineated by whitespace, Arabic packs more information within whitespace.  For example:
شاهدتُهم (I saw them) as a written unit bounded by whitespace consists of I + saw + them, which in English is three units.  
So for this example, what takes one 'word' in written Arabic requires three in English.

Perhaps you should factor this difference of information packing between English and Arabic.
Waheed Samy  

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2)
Date: 12 Jan 2010
From:Dil Parkinson <dil at byu.edu>
Subject:Arabic demonstratives


There may be something to explain, but you probably have your data wrong, at least for American English.  I searched for this|that|these|those in the 400 million word corpus of American English, and got 1975 instances per 100,000 (which comes out to be about 400 per 20,000, not 100).  Admittedly, there is spoken English in this corpus, but it is overwhelmingly written.  I don't think you are going to be able to get it down to 100 per 20,000: perhaps you meant that more as a 'suppose or for example' than an actual claim).

l looked at separate newspapers in arabiCorpus for hvA|hvh|vlk|tlk|hWlAC|LwlAC and found the following:

Ahram (Egypt): 1240 per 100,000
Thawra (Syria): 1240 per 100,000
Tajdid (Morocco): 1600 per 100,000
Modern Literature: 1158 per 100,000
Pre-modern corpus: 2050 per 100,000

Except for the pre-modern corpus (which is small and rather idiosyncratic, so I wouldn't trust those numbers that much), it is clear that Arabic writers use the common demonstratives a lot less than American English writers do.  Note the remarkable consistency in the Egypt/Syria percentages, while the Moroccan numbers are significantly higher.

To repeat, there is something to explain, but it is not why Arabs use them more.

dil

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End of Arabic-L:  12 Jan 2010


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