Religious Binomials in Hebrew and Arabic: A Review of Literature
Al-Otaibi, Ghuzayyil Mohammed . 2021
Binomials (i.e., a collocation of two connected words belonging to the same word class, e.g., heaven and earth) are very frequent in every language. They are more commonly found in religious texts of Semitic languages. Compared to other types of collocations, religious binomials are sometimes idiomatic, alliterative, culture-specific, or adhere to one common word order. However, as there is a dearth of studies on religious binomials in Hebrew, there is only one study on religious Arabic binomials used in a supplication. Studies on Hebrew focused on the constraints determining the order of binomial words, their semantic and grammatical categorization, how frequent they are, their functions, etc. Corpus-based studies on Semitic binomials were conducted for the purpose of proving that Semitic languages are similar. Nevertheless, there are no studies that explored religious binomials in Arabic in relation to those used in Hebrew. Thus, it might be insightful if future research on binomials focuses on religious ones in the Holy Qurʾān and Ḥadīth.
Binomials, as a sub-type of collocation, are made of two connected words (e.g., heaven and earth). Similar to other lexical collocations, binomials can be idiomatic, ambiguous, or culture-specific…
Background: Synonymous words behave differently, and language users should be aware of the fact that though near-synonyms share similar denotational meanings, they require different collocates.…