High- And Low-Frequency Arabic Verbs and Their Semantic Fields in Everyday Communication: Evidence from Selected Episodes of Hello Jadoo Arabic Cartoon Series
2026· International journal of research and innovation in social science· Vol 10, pp. 827-845· 0 citations
Abstract
This study examines the frequency distribution, semantic fields and usage patterns of Arabic verbs in everyday communication as represented in selected episodes of the Arabic-dubbed Hello Jadoo cartoon series. Using a descriptive corpus-based approach, the study analysed selected dialogue transcripts and identified 1,126 Arabic verb occurrences, which were mapped onto 295 distinct verb lemmas. Based on recurrence, the lemmas were classified into 101 high-frequency verbs and 194 low-frequency verbs. The findings show that the selected dialogues rely on a relatively small core of repeatedly used verbs, with كان (kāna), قال (qāla) and فعل (faʿala) emerging as the most frequent lemmas. These high-frequency verbs were mainly associated with everyday semantic domains such as state or existence, communication, action, movement, desire and food-related activities. The usage-pattern analysis further indicates that these verbs function in practical communicative contexts, including narrating daily actions, describing situations, reporting speech, managing movement, expressing cognition and indicating ability or intention. Overall, the study suggests that Arabic cartoon dialogues can provide contextualised exposure to frequently used verbs in familiar everyday situations and may inform vocabulary selection in Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL), particularly by highlighting frequent verbs, semantically relevant and functionally useful for daily communication.
This paper investigates the role of semantic features of noun and adjective bases in determining the grammatical behaviour of Ancient Greek denominal and deadjectival verbs in *‐
ye/o
‐. The paper adopts a lexicalist framework (Rappaport Hovav & Levin 1998) and examines how the event schema, actionality, telicity and voice of derived verbs are influenced by the mass/count, concrete/abstract, animacy and agentivity properties of the base. After providing a semantic classification of ancient Greek denominal and deadjectival verbs (Clark & Clark 1979), the paper shows that the mass/count feature interacts with verbal telicity, though not as proposed by Harley (1999, 2005). A ±
mass/count
noun derives atelic/telic verbs depending on the event schema into which it is embedded, rather than directly on the mass/count distinction. The abstractness of the base restricts the range of compatible event schemas, with consequences on the actionality and the voice of derived verbs. Animate bases can be inserted only into
agent
/
quality
event schemas, characterised by ambiguity between a stative and an eventive reading and variability in the voice marking. Overall, the study demonstrates that the semantic features of the base play a central role in shaping the grammatical behaviour of ancient Greek denominal and deadjectival verbs.
Carolina Marescotti· Transactions of the Philolog...· 0 citations
This corpus-based study investigates the near-synonymous cognitive nouns idea, thought, and notion using the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The analysis examines genre distribution and verb–adjective collocational patterns to identify usage-based constraints on their interchangeability. Frequency results show that thought is the most frequent overall, idea occurs most often in informal genres such as blogs and TV/movie subtitles, and notion is strongly associated with academic texts. To examine semantic behaviour, the top 20 verb and adjective collocates of each noun were extracted using combined frequency measures and a Mutual Information threshold (MI ≥ 3). These collocates were grouped into semantic categories based on shared meanings, with reliability ensured through expert validation, yielding an inter-coder agreement rate of at least 85%. The findings reveal both overlap and distinction: all three nouns share evaluative themes such as NEGATIVE SENSE, UNCERTAINTY, and CONCEPTUAL meaning, while idea aligns with proposal-oriented contexts, thought with temporal and clarity-related meanings, and notion with accepted and distributive meanings in academic discourse. Pedagogically, the results highlight the value of teaching these nouns through genre awareness and collocational patterns. Explicit comparison of expressions such as reject an idea, share a thought, and support a notion can enhance EFL and ESL learners’ lexical accuracy and contextual appropriateness.
Thayakorn Klomkaew· The New English Teacher· 0 citations
The article examines the functional role of English verb tenses in the process of text
construction. The main aim of the study is to show that verb tenses function not only as a grammatical
category but also as an important resource in text organisation, ensuring logical sequencing and
expressing communicative intent. The study analyses the role of verb tenses in the formation of textual
cohesion and coherence based on Systemic Functional Linguistics and discourse analysis
approaches. In particular, it demonstrates how tense selection in different types of texts—especially
narrative and academic styles—influences the presentation of information and its interpretation by
the reader. The analysis is based on a corpus-based qualitative approach and investigates the impact
of tense selection on discourse organisation at both micro (sentence and inter-sentential) and macro
(textual and genre) levels. The results show that verb tenses do not only express temporal relations
but also function as key discourse resources that ensure textual structural integrity, regulate
information flow, and define genre distinctions. At the same time, inappropriate selection of tense
forms may reduce textual clarity and communicative effectiveness. From this perspective, studying
verb tenses within a functional framework is of significant importance for both theoretical linguistics
and practical language use.
This study explores the relationship between low-frequency lexical forms and lexical innovation by examining infrequent and non-lexicalised adjectives formed with the suffix -able (e.g., jokeable, trickable). Employing a corpusbased analysis of the 20-billion-word News on the Web (NOW) corpus (2010–2025), we identified over 800 infrequent Xable adjectives. After filtering for orthographical errors, brand names, and incorrect forms, a dataset of novel lexical items was isolated using the OED for evidence of attestation. Morphological patterns and usage contexts were analysed, highlighting factors such as (1) frequency distribution over 2010–2025, (2) geographical coverage, (3) contextual anchoring in the collocate environment, and 4) base form and derivative co-occurrence. Findings contribute insights into lexical innovation, morphological productivity, and the stages of lexical integration from a dynamic usage-based perspective (Schmid 2020).
Chris A. Smith· Arbeiten aus Anglistik und A...· 0 citations
This study investigates the structural and semantic characteristics of Arabic collocations in the Indonesia Al-Youm digital news corpus, a corpus compiled from Arabic-language online news texts reporting Indonesian social, political, cultural, and economic issues. Using Sketch Engine’s Multiword Term extraction feature, the study identifies and classifies the top 100 recurrent multiword units according to their morphosyntactic structures, grammatical functions, and semantic domains. The findings show that Arabic journalistic discourse in this corpus is dominated by nominal constructions, particularly idafah, noun–adjective patterns, and Masdar-based formations. Semantically, the collocations cluster around six domains: media identity and digital technology, politics and diplomacy, social protection and administration, economy and development, tourism, culture, and geography, and proper names. The novelty of this study lies in its corpus-based mapping of Arabic collocation patterns within an Indonesian digital news context, an area that remains underexplored in Arabic corpus linguistics. The results contribute to the description of Arabic journalistic phraseology and provide empirical input for Arabic for Specific Purposes, especially journalistic Arabic and media translation instruction.
This study presents a contrastive analysis of appropinquation verbs in Arabic and English. Appropinquation verbs, a well-defined grammatical category in Arabic grammar (أفعال المقاربة), express concepts of temporal imminence, inception, and hopeful expectation. The research investigates the significant typological differences between the two languages: Arabic employs a closed set of synthetic verbs with specific syntactic constraints, requiring a subject in the nominative and a predicate in the accusative case (typically a present tense verb). Since English has no direct grammatical counterpart, it instead uses a variety of multi-word expressions to convey similar meanings, such as the modal phrase 'be about to,' the phrasal verb 'set about,' and catenative verbs like 'begin. The results show that Arabic and English convey proximity in distinct ways: Arabic uses morphological forms, while English uses phrasal structures.
The research aims to expand the body of knowledge in the field of comparative linguistics and semantics, through theoretical analysis and comparison between two linguistic systems. The results of this theoretical research may lay the groundwork for subsequent applied research, such as developing materials for teaching Arabic or English to learners, improving machine translation tools. This study adopts a descriptive–contrastive approach to examine syntactic and semantic differences between Arabic and English appropinquation constructions.”
Faiza Qanbar Ali· Journal of the College of B...· 0 citations