A corpus-based Analysis of Adjective Patterns in English and Arabic Newspapers from a Cognitive Perspective

Document Type : Original Article

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English Teacher at Ibn Khaldoun International School

Abstract

The research is conducted to examine the occurrence of adjectives in English and Arabic newspaper corpora. The purpose is to find out the most frequent lexical phrases and their phraseological patterns. In addition, the study is an attempt to explain the cognitive phenomenon behind how linguistic units are constructed, produced and developed into other forms. The theoretical framework is the usage-based cognitive approach that focuses on the integration of lexical items and the role of frequency and usage in entrenching and generalizing new schematic constructions. Corpus linguistics, as a method, analyzes naturally occurring language obtained from corpora by means of specialized software. Both corpora, the Arabic Ar Ten Ten and the En Ten Ten, are processed by Sketch Engine. The Ar Ten Ten corpus, a collection of Arabic texts from the web, is contrasted with the En Ten Ten Corpus that contains materials from leading English newspaper agencies. The results show that all the constructions of the adjective category are operated by the same single category prototype in both languages. All adjective patterns are either instances or extensions of the central prototype.

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