Collocation and the Arabic-English Dictionary: Ideas for Better Dictionaries

Abstract

Collocation, thus far, has been infrequently used to clarify senses in Arabic-English dictionaries. However, this lexical phenomenon can be used more effectively to improve these dictionaries in many ways: it can help determine if a given word belongs to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Classical Arabic; it can identify the various lexical contexts in which the headword may appear, thus enabling the lexicographer to use frequent ones in the dictionary and separate collocations from multi-word units; it can indicate cases of undertranslation and overtranslation; senses given to a certain headword can be verified against the collocational range of the headword in order to decide if such English equivalents are indeed valid senses or not and, finally, the systematic use of collocates in the bilingual dictionary as well as the development of collocational bilingual dictionaries can be demonstrably of great help to the language learner. .