Grammatical Gender Assignment in Arabic Technological Term: A Syntactic Analysis of Genitive Constructions (Iḍāfah) in Newspapers Discourse
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21111/lisanudhad.v13i1.27Keywords:
Genitive, Gender Grammatical, Technology, Ta’wīlī, HukmiAbstract
This research aims to explain the mechanism for determining grammatical gender in technological terms in modern Arabic, emphasizing the relationships among morphological forms, syntactic structures, and semantic contexts. This study is a descriptive, synchronic linguistic study using data on technology terms from the newspapers be explained solely by morphological forms, because most of these terms lack clear feminine markers. However, in syntactic usage, they can appear as either masculine or feminine. These findings affirm that the gender of borrowed terms is contextual and primarily determined by the syntactic-semantics relations surrounding them. Specifically, at the syntactic level, gender can be categorized into two forms, namely ḥukmī and ta’wīlī, both of which are influenced by the presence of the annexation (iḍāfah) construction in phrases or sentences containing technological terms. In this case, annexation (iḍāfah) functions affirmation, both through the explicitly present muḍāf and through the omitted muḍāf that is restored through the process of ta’wīl. Thus, this research expands the study of grammatical gender in Arabic by positioning annexation (iḍāfah) not only as a genitive construction but also as an active grammatical device in the integration of modern technological terms. However, the limitation of this study lies in the use of a newspaper corpus that does not fully reflect the full range of contemporary Arabic
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