Contact Information

Office: 3058 JFSB

Phone: 422-4684

E-mail: dil@byu.edu

Courses Taught:
Arabic 201, 202, 426

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.

He recently published 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.

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 also programmed a new corpus tool to aid in the lemmatizing of large amounts of raw text in Arabic. This tool will be used to create a balanced 30,000,000 word corpus that will be the basis of a new Arabic word frequency list to be published by Routledge.

He took a fairly large group of students to Alexandria, Egypt for an advanced Intensive Arabic Language Study Abroad experience during Fall Semester, 2004 (September-December).

Degrees

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

Interests

Arabic Corpus Linguistics, Arabic Sociolinguistics, Arabic Language Teaching