A CORPUS ANALYSIS OF IBN FAKHHAR’S ZARZURIYYAT PROSE BASED ON SEMANTIC FIELD THEORY

Abstract

The study of corpus, one of the sub-fields in linguistic studies, is widely used in to study world languages including Arabic. However, the Arabic corpus study has its limitations due to the various modes of Arabic categorized as modern standard Arabic, classical Arabic and colloquial Arabic dialects used in various Arab countries in the Middle East. Though there many studies conducted on Arabic using computerized corpus analysis, the Field Semantic Theory has not been extensively utilized. The present study aimed to analyze an Arabic literary text using the thematic analysis. Using secondary data source, a literary prose text titled Zarzuriyyat by Ibn Fakhar, this study combined word relationships following the Semantic Field Theory. It involved two stages which were the corpus analysis and framework analysis phases. The findings show that this text has two main themes, which are generosity of a person and Zarzuur bird which is also known as European starling. The two themes are interconnected with one other through the antonym relationship. In describing the characteristics of a generous person, Ibn Fakhaar used exclusively meronym. However, when describing the characteristics of the bird, he used five types of relationships, namely polysemy, hypernym, hyponym, holonym and meronym. This study proves that thematic corpus analysis, which derived from the study of corpus and Semantic Field Theory can enhance the understanding of a literary text.