Contact Information

Office: 3058 JFSB

Phone: 422-4684

Email: dil@byu.edu

Commonly Taught Courses Arabic 201, 202, 426

Biography: Dilworth Parkinson is a Professor of Arabic. He received his MA and PhD in Arabic Linguistics from the University of Michigan, in 1976 and 1982 respectively. His recent publications include Using Arabic Synonyms, a vocabularly building book for advanced students published in the Cambridge University Press series. The citations are based on a large corpus of newspaper Arabic, and mining them involves the use of some of the corpus tools that he has been developing. More recently, his A Frequency Dictionary of Arabic appeared, published by Routledge, coauthored with Tim Buckwalter. It is based on a new 30 million word balanced corpus or Arabic, including spoken Arabic. He is currently developing a website, arabiCorpus.byu.edu, which is being designed to allow students and scholars to search large untagged Arabic corpora for words and structures. It provides information on word frequency, citations giving 10 words before and 10 words after, and information on collocates of the word in question. Some regular expression searching is also possible, allowing the user to find larger structures and grammatical patterns. He has taken charge of BYU's Arabic Study Abroad program in recent years. He took students to Alexandria, Egypt in 2004, to Amman, Jordan in 2009, to Cairo, Egypt in 2010, and back to Amman during Fall Semester of 2011. He will also direct the Fall Semester 2012 program in Amman.

Degrees: MA, U. of Michigan, 1976
PhD, U. of Michigan, 1982

Interests: Arabic Corpus Linguistics, Arabic Sociolinguistics, Arabic Language Teaching