The Lexico-grammatical Ecology of Media Arabic Genre: A Multi-dimensional Analysis

Abstract

Media Arabic is a linguistically independent genre of Modern Standard Arabic. There are a number of explanatory reasons accounting for a characterized, integrally structured media Arabic form. Much within our scientific grasp is the overall combination of lexico-grammatical traits, constituting a major part of the internal textual ecology. Within our reach, again, there is parsimonious literature hardly informing, or predicting, what situationally and linguistically a media Arabic text is. The vast body of research is intuition-governed and prescriptive. This paper is a concise exposition of a work endeavoring to fill out such a gap in research. It summarizes the findings of a large-scale project in Arabic corpus linguistics that empirically investigates media Arabic genre from a functional lexico-grammatical perspective, by using Multi-Dimensional framework. The model uncovers the parameters of variation in media Arabic and explores underlying co-occurring functions. In documenting MSA textual similarities and differences among ten written media subgenres: Politics, Economics, Society, Sports, Science, Culture & Arts, Technology, Women, Health & Medicine, and Religion, Exploratory Factor Analysis was run and resolved within a six-factorial structure, the raw output to be subsequently interpreted as six-dimensional basis for the variable use of Arabic across the ten subgenres.