Digital Readings on Collocational Networks in Mahfouz’s Translated “Trilogy” from Frequencies to Creating Contextual Cultural Meaning

Alhamshary, Yousreya A

doi:10.21608/ejlt.2023.241124.1043

Digital Readings on Collocational Networks in Mahfouz’s Translated “Trilogy” from Frequencies to Creating Contextual Cultural Meaning

Document Type : Research in linguistic and literary studies

Author

Yousreya A Alhamshary

Department of English, Faculty of Education, Damanhour university

10.21608/ejlt.2023.241124.1043

Abstract

Reflecting on how to create meanings in texts across languages is a core activity for translators and scholars. A text in a particular field of discourse is organized into lexical patterns that can be visualized as networks of words that collocate with each other to build a certain meaning. This idea has important theoretical implications for understanding the relationship between the text and the discourse community in the writer’s and translator’s minds. This article demonstrates how certain words work together to reflect certain perspectives of social life and the writer’s ideology, particularly when the intended message relies on understanding the sociolinguistic context in which collocations are used. This study also examines how meaning is conveyed and preserved through lexical patterns in Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy. It also employs a descriptive, analytical method to identify types of collocational networks and applies Baker’s model, which involves identifying different types of collocations based on their semantic and grammatical properties and Newmark’s culture categorizations. The data were analyzed using Sketch Engine software, and the corpus size consisted of 573069 tokens, 481254 words, and 33905 sentences. The data distribution shows that content words, especially nouns and adjectives, are most frequently used. The collocational structure mostly used is noun + adjective, followed by verb + adjective and adverb, indicating that descriptive language is mainly used.

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