Date of Award

4-2010

Thesis Type

PhD

Document Type

Thesis

Divisions

Faculty of Languages and Linguistics

Department

Department of Arabic and Middle Eastern Languages

Institution

Universiti Malaya

Abstract

Collocation is a universal linguistic phenomenon and has been a common concern among linguists, lexicographers as well as language pedagogues and those involved in translation works. Arabic language has paid special attention to collocation usage, although in the early days it had not been recognized nor termed as collocation. Arabic collocations have existed in the Jahiliah poetry, or Islamic texts such as the Holy Qur’an as well as in language and literature books. This thesis characterizes collocations in the Arabic language, by classifying grammatical and semantic distributional patterns of collocations and investigates the problems of its translation into Malay language. The research is a corpus-based analysis as it used the Arabic corpus of F³ ¨il±l al-Qur'±n and its translation in Malaysian-Malay and Indonesian-Malay as the main source of data. Some patterns of Arabic collocations can easily be identified using a software called aConcorde, but others were identified manually. This is because not all words in Arabic collocations occur side by side as in English. This research regards idioms, proverbs, and fixed expressions as part of collocation. These collocations are naturally culture bound, hence will pose problems in translation. Therefore, this research also analyzes those problems and the strategies used by the translators to overcome them. The most important findings in this research is the alternate patterns of Arabic collocations that have never been discussed by previous reseachers. Those new patterns are: (1) M± + Min Structure Collocation, (2) Prepositional Collocation, (3) Noun + Prepositional Phrase Collocation, (4) Singular Noun + Preposition + Plural Noun Collocation, and (5) Combination of Particles Amm± + Fa Collocation. The analysis of translation of those patterns of collocation shows that there is often literal translation in Malaysian-Malay as well as in Indonesian-Malay. Some of the literal translation occur as the result of lack of knowledge about collocations, especially when they appear as idioms, fixed expressions or proverbs. Another important finding is several characteristics of collocations which could be used as a guidance in deciding whether combinations of lexemes could be identified as collocations.

Initial

khm

Additional Information

Thesis (PhD) – Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya, 2010.

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