Media Arabic Grammar: Syntax and Semantics of the Hard News Sentence, a Corpus Investigation

This monograph presents a corpus-driven investigation into the syntax and semantics of Media Arabic, with a focus on the sentence as a register-defining unit in contemporary hard news discourse. Based on a manually annotated corpus of 1,144 sentences (c. 35,000 words) drawn from the September 2014 print edition of Al-Ahram, the study systematically analyzes clause linking, verbal morphology, passives, futures, negation, and peripheral structures such as participles, prepositional phrases, adverbials, and nominalized (complement) clauses. The data have been annotated using the WebAnno tool, enabling a structured approach to the quantitative and qualitative analysis of constituent relations and semantic linkings.

The study foregrounds how Media Arabic—while functional within the framework of Modern Standard Arabic—exhibits a distinct sentence-level grammar shaped by the rhetorical and structural demands of hard news journalism. Peripheral and non-finite constructions emerge as salient features, as does a patterned use of clause linking and semantic relations that depart in systematic ways from classical and literary norms. The theoretical framework engages with notions of register, genre, and style, as an early step in situating Media Arabic within broader typological and functionalist perspectives. Addressing a significant lacuna in Arabic linguistics, this work contributes an empirical foundation for future scholarship in syntax, corpus linguistics, and language pedagogy. It also offers a descriptive reference for the development of advanced instructional materials in Arabic as a foreign language and for applied work in media and translation studies.