Utilizzo delle TIC nella ricerca linguistica sull’arabo scritto contemporaneo: il sistema ipotetico

Abstract

By the present article we aim at contributing to the study of conditional systems in the so-called fuṣḥā (“most pure”, “most eloquent”) contemporary written Arabic. In the attempt to provide a more faithful portrayal of nowadays situation of written fuṣḥā, our study focuses on the contemporary use of written fuṣḥā on the web. Through the application of ICT to corpus-based analysis we have been able to compare a large amount of linguistic data extracted from a selection of Arab blogs and forums dealing with some very topical issues. Given the complexity of conditional systems in the Arabic language, our research only focuses on the conditional hypothetical system introduced by the conditional operator ’in “if”, whose concordances have been extrapolated by means of a term extractor, the freeware AntConc software in our case. In order to fully appreciate the socio-pragmatic implications of the linguistic choices found in our corpus, these have been analyzed also in sociolinguistic terms. Our analysis comes complete with a diachronic presentation of the most important studies on the topic by the main Arab grammarians and linguists, as well as by western scholars in Arabic linguistics. The results of our research present us with extremely interesting new data that partially contradict and partially further develop what has so far been outlined in the scientific literature in the field.