Media Arabic Grammar and Semantics. Clauses and non-core elements : A corpus investigation of print hard news

Abstract: ”Media Arabic” is taught on universities all over the world and its understanding ranks among the top-reasons for students to pursue Arabic studies. The coursebooks on ”Media Arabic” focus on print hard news and tacitly assume the existence of an Arabic journalese. Previous research on Arabic newspaper language is scarce.Focusing on the morphosyntax and semantics of subordinate and peripheral syntagms within the sentence of a Media Arabic corpus, this thesis aims to quantitatively answer the question of what characterizes Media Arabic from a linguistic perspective.This study is a corpus investigation of print hard news based on a corpus of 35,000 words, or 1,144 sentences, taken from the Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram, September 2014. The core focus is on the morphosyntax, and logico-semantic relations of peripheral nominal and clausal non-core elements to their matrices or heads. In laymen terms: the grammar and meaning of adverbs, prepositional phrases, and subordinate clauses.Following a description of the corpus, journalism and journalese, Media Arabic, their contextualization, and relevant theoretical preliminaries, peculiarities, and the methodology, the analysis centres around the morphosyntax and semantics of the attested 1,144 main clauses, 891 complement main clauses and 828 complementizers, 869 non-nominalized non-main clauses, 642 non-deverbalized relative clauses, 473 adverbs (including peripheral accusative nouns), 461 peripheral and predicative participles (including nominalized relative clauses), 40 peripheral accusative verbal nouns, and 6391 prepositional phrases. Backed by detailed quantitative data, the study concludes that the language of Arabic news is characterized linguistically by a high degree of formalization.