Film discourse: A resource for creating a dialect dictionary

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The Arabic language is a linguistic phenomenon marked by its various dialectal forms coexisting with a unified literary form, which calls for innovative lexicographic and sourcing approaches. Aiming to create a new type of dictionary, we examine the film text of Syrian series as a source of dialectal vocabulary, recorded in the speech of the characters. The recording of dialectal lexical units in the film text occurs, among other things, in the form of subtitles with equivalents in literary Arabic provided by the film makers. The research material consists of historical series in the Syrian dialect; the methodology involves a comprehensive sampling of lexical and paremical units followed by comparative, semantic, componential, etymological and linguocultural analysis. The novelty of the research lies in the proposed methodology for using film discourse as a source of dialectal vocabulary in the Arabic language, with subsequent processing of the lexical material: 1) distinguishing between dialectal and literary words; 2) creating phonetic, grammatical and etymological commentary; 3) interpreting; and 4) giving illustrations based on the materials from the series; analyzing paremical units. An additional block of the dictionary entry may include equivalents of the headword from other Arabic dialects (lexical network) with possible indications of their connection to the literary source.