‘Heart’ Collocations as Used in English and Arabic Languages

Abstract

Human body vocabulary (HBV) has always attracted the attention of researchers in the field of semantic typology (Nan 2012; Enfield et al 2006; Wang and Wang (n.d.), among others). Thus, this study aims at drawing a comparison between English and Arabic languages in terms of the collocations related to the body part “Heart". In other words, it aims at investigating the semantic similarities and differences of body part term under study in the two languages. To achieve the goal of this study, collocations confined to the word Heart are gathered from five well known dictionaries; Al-Hafiz Arabic Collocations Dictionary, Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English, Al-Mawrid (a modern Arabic-English dictionary), Mu'jam Lisan Al Arab Al-Muhit, and Muhit Al-Muhit (a modern elaborative Arabic dictionary). Then collocations are classified into five grammatical patterns: heart + noun (e.g., heart operation); adjective+ heart (e.g., strong heart); heart + verb (e.g., heart sink); verb + heart (e.g., break someone’s heart); heart of + phrase (e.g., heart of the matter). The results of this study show that there isn’t a clear relationship between the grammatical pattern and the extended or the idiomatic meaning of the "heart" collocations in the both languages for example, 69 collocations of the total 92 (75%) collocations which classified by the five grammatical categories convey figurative meanings with the exception of those collocations that relate to the medical conditions of heart as a body organ. Furthermore, English collocations are somehow similar to their correspondences in Arabic and this is indicated by the percentages which show that the group of equivalence that consists of the largest equivalent collocations is the absolute or identical equivalents under the five grammatical categories.

Keywords: Semantic typology, comparison, collocation, grammatical patterns.