A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Lexical and Grammatical Properties of Arabic Abstracts in Social Sciences Articles

Abstract

This study aims to analyze quantitatively and quantitatively Arabic journal articles’ abstracts written within the field of social sciences. It mainly aims to analyze the lexical and grammatical qualities of the abstracts in the five academic disciplines; Economy, Geography, Psychology, Sociology, and Law,. To achieve the goal of the study, a corpus consisting of 500,000 words was collected from various well-known Arabic journals, and then it was divided into five sub-corpora each of which represented one academic discipline. The Corpus Linguistics approach was applied to this study and the data were analyzed through using WordSmith tools (version 0.7). The quantitative results show that the abstracts in all disciplines show a similar word mean length, i.e. all of them is around (5). Qualitatively speaking, the results show that each discipline has its list of lexical words that are suitable for each discipline's genre. The results also reveal a small amount of variation in terms of the tense of the reporting verbs specifically those which are used in the introductory part of the abstracts. However, the reporting verbs used in the body and the concluding parts of all abstracts are characterized by the past tense, third person, and active voice.