A Corpus-Based Study of the Arabic Lemma /mαṯαr/ (rain) and its Inflections in the Glorious Qur’an: A Linguaculture Perspective.

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Rain is always linked in the human mind with prosperity and growth. Although, this is not the case with all occurrences of the word rain and its inflections in the Qur’an. This paper focuses on studying the Arabic lemma مطر /mαṯαr/ (rain) and its inflections in the Glorious Qur’an. The presented research elucidates the non-habitual collocations of this word in all its occurrences, and deduces the semantic prosody indicated by these collocations. Moreover, the paper touches on the link between language and culture and points out the strong relation between them, and the mutual effect of each of them on the other. This work takes a linguacultural approach based on corpus linguistics to analyse the Qur’anic verses in which the lemma understudy and its inflections occur. The study focuses on their collocations and the indicated semantic prosodies. SketchEngine is used to help in analysing the verses by automatically obtaining the concordances and collocations. After that, the indication of the semantic prosody of the lemmas and their collocations are deeply investigated. Furthermore, the paper gives an informative background on the relation between language and culture, and the effect of these two fields on each other. A brief on corpus linguistics and the importance of automatic tools, such as Sketch Engine, is also given. One of the main revelations of the qualitative and quantitative analyses presented in this paper is that all instances of مطر /mαṯαr/ (rain) in Qur’an have ‘negative’ semantic prosody, while its other synonyms all have ‘positive’ semantic prosodies.