Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / The Holy Qurʾān, like the Bible, is an acknowledged literary masterpiece. Its linguistic and aesthetic vivacity with an amalgam of religious beliefs, moral values, religious social orthodoxy and historical backgrounds pose a great challenge to any translator and make the task overwhelmingly arduous, if not unattainable. The study aims at examining the problems the Qurʾān translators encounter while translating near-synonyms from Arabic into English. It is based on the translations of two professional translators namely, Yusuf Ali and T.B. Irving. The translations provide an empirical basis for the discussion of the problems while translating Qurʾānnic texts into English. The corpus for the present study includes the translations of four near-synonymous pairs namely, ghayth and maṭar, al-ḥilf and al-qasm, bakhīl and shaḥīḥ and ʿāqir and ʿaqīm in their Qurʾānic context. The two translated texts are compared to determine to which extent the translations reflect the referential and the connotative meaning of the original Qurʾānic text as well as to which extent they maintain the textuality standards such as cohesion, coherence, informativity, situationality and acceptability, intentionality and intertextuality. In short, the study sets out to identify the roblematic areas in the translated Qurʾānic texts at the lexical and textual levels with a view to determining what makes one translation better than the other, or what brings one translation closer to the original text than the other.The study is an intersection between Qurʾānic exegeses (tafsīr) and applied linguistics. The researcher consults different books on translation theories as well as of Qurʾānic exegeses (tafsīr) to facilitate the process of analyzing the near-synonyms in their Qurʾānic context. The researcher opts for eclecticism, instead of confining to a particular rigid model or approach, which is a combination of text-analysis translation-oriented approaches of De Beaugrande & Dressler(1981); Neubert & Shreve(1992); Halliday (1994) and Hatim & Mason (1990). In addition, the study draws upon the multiple and theoretical implications of Nida's dynamic equivalence, Beekman & Callow's (1974) historical and dynamic fidelity and Gutt's (1991) relevance theory and the emphasis on communication as mainly context-dependent. These models are closely related and reliable in the process of analyzing and evaluating the problems encountered in Arabic-English translation of the Qurʾānic near-synonyms. Furthermore, the researcher suggests an outline approach for the process of analyzing the Qurʾānic near-synonyms translations in a systemic and organized way thereby ensuring maximum and effective communication of the Qurʾānic message. The study concludes that the Qurʾān translator, compared to other literary genres, faces many difficulties in translating the Qurʾānic ST message. The selected translations of the Holy Qurʾān have failed to measure up to the depth of the Qurʾānic message, its originality and the connotative shades of meanings of the original expression. The study attributes these problems to contextual, socio-cultural, theological and historical factors which create differences that lead to gaps or absence of lexicalization in the TT. Furthermore, the reliance on dictionary meaning rather than the meaning of the lexical item in context, the negligence of context culture as well as the context of situation (the reason for the revelation of the verses) affect the “periodicity” of the text as indicated by Martin & Rose (2007, p.187), that is, the information flow of the whole text. Accordingly, this affects maintaining the standards of textuality and the fidelity which a religious text should meet. The complexity of the Qurʾān as genre is a great challenge to the translator at both the lexical and Qurʾān textual levels, which dilutes the authenticity of the holy text and misrepresents its true message. The conclusion of the study which contains recommendations based on experience may prove helpful to the future novice and professional translators to improve the quality of translation in general and religious translation in particular. The study is a contribution towards a greater understanding of the subtle differences between the near-synonymous pairs in their Qurʾānic context through Arabic-English translation. It is a novel addition to the world of religious translation, Qurʾān translation, ḥadīth and in English. It also contributes to some extent to modern exegeses of the Qurʾān. It is hoped that the work will encourage further studies in the field of translation to employ a context-based linguistic approach to translating different genres and sacred texts in particular, integrating insights from applicable translation and linguistic approaches. / South Africa

This thesis describes the work of creating an automatic system for identifying synonyms and semantically related words in medical texts. Before this work, as a part of the project E-care@home, medical texts have been classified as either lay or specialized by both a lay annotator and an expert annotator. The lay annotator, in this case, is a person without any medical knowledge, whereas the expert annotator has professional knowledge in medicine. Using these texts made it possible to create co-occurrences matrices from which the related words could be identified. Fifteen medical terms were chosen as system input. The Dice similarity of these words in a context window of ten words around them was calculated. As output, five candidate related terms for each medical term was returned. Only unigrams were considered. The candidate related terms were evaluated using a questionnaire, where 223 healthcare professionals rated the similarity using a scale from one to five. A Fleiss kappa test showed that the agreement among these raters was 0.28, which is a fair agreement. The evaluation further showed that there was a significant correlation between the human ratings and the relatedness score (Dice similarity). That is, words with higher Dice similarity tended to get a higher human rating. However, the Dice similarity interval in which the words got the highest average human rating was 0.35-0.39. This result means that there is much room for improving the system. Further developments of the system should remove the unigram limitation and expand the corpus the provide a more accurate and reliable result.

Detecting topics by extracting keywords from written text using TF-IDF has been studied and successfully used in many applications. Adding a semantic layer to TF-IDF-based topic detection using WordNet synonyms and hypernyms has been explored in document clustering by assigning concepts that describe texts or by adding all synonyms and hypernyms that occurring words have to a list of keywords. A new method where TF-IDF scores are calculated and WordNet synset members’ TF-IDFscores are added together to all occurring synonyms and/or hypernyms is explored in this paper. Here, such an approach is evaluated by comparing extracted keywords using TF-IDF and the new proposed method, SynPlusTF-IDF, against manually assigned keywords in a database of scientific abstracts. As topic detection is widely used in many contexts and applications, improving current methods is of great value as the methods can become more accurate at extracting correct and relevant keywords from written text. An experiment was conducted comparing the two methods and their accuracy measured using precision and recall and by calculating F1-scores.The F1-scores ranged from 0.11131 to 0.14264 for different variables and the results show that SynPlusTF-IDF is not better at topic detection compared to TF-IDF and both methods performed poorly at topic detection with the chosen dataset.

An important component of nativelike language production is linked to the knowledge of near-synonyms and their collocational patterns. The purpose of this corpus-based study was three-fold: (a) an examination of the frequency distribution across registers of the three near-synonyms change, alter, and modify; (b) their collocational patterns; and (c) their interchangeability. A lexical study on their distribution across registers in the BNC was conducted, examining the collocational strength between near-synonyms and their collocations in Sketch Engine. Subsequently, attempts were made to determine the potential interchangeability of the near-synonyms. The comparative analysis indicates that the near-synonyms differ from each other with reference to formality, as alter and modify tend to be used more in written and formal language than change. Further to this, and to some extent, they reveal different collocational patterns. More specifically, they often did not share collocates, although the verbs were near-synonyms. Change was more polysemous than alter and modify, which have more restricted collocational patterns. Furthermore, the interchangeability of change and alter were higher than for modify. Nevertheless, the formality and meaning were affected as change is less formal than alter and modify. The findings from the analyses are of value to second language learners and can support further knowledge in the field of linguistics, specific to near-synonyms and collocations.

The aim of this thesis was to study change in the meaning of the word cool, comparing the 1890s, the 1950s and the 2010s. Examples where the word cool was used were obtained from the Corpus of Historical American English, which is created by Mark Davies, and analyzed in terms of in which senses and text types they were used. The results show that the biggest meaning change in cool between the 1890s and the 2010s is that the most prominent sense in the 1890s is ‘calm’, and ‘slightly cold in a pleasant way’ not far after, and in the 2010s the most prominent sense was ‘pleasant, enjoyable or likable’. The most frequent senses of cool in the 1950s were ‘slightly cold in a pleasant way’, ‘temperature that is too cold’, and ‘calm’ as the most commonly used. The most prominent text type where the word cool occurred was fiction in all three analyzed decades.

An important component of nativelike language production is linked to the knowledge of near-synonyms and their collocational patterns. The purpose of this corpus-based study was three-fold: (a) an examination of the frequency distribution across registers of the three near-synonyms change, alter, and modify; (b) their collocational patterns; and (c) their interchangeability. A lexical study on their distribution across registers in the BNC was conducted, examining the collocational strength between near-synonyms and their collocations in Sketch Engine. Subsequently, attempts were made to determine the potential interchangeability of the near-synonyms. The comparative analysis indicates that the near-synonyms differ from each other with reference to formality, as alter and modify tend to be used more in written and formal language than change. Further to this, and to some extent, they reveal different collocational patterns. More specifically, they often did not share collocates, although the verbs were near-synonyms. Change was more polysemous than alter and modify, which have more restricted collocational patterns. Furthermore, the interchangeability of change and alter were higher than for modify. Nevertheless, the formality and meaning were affected as change is less formal than alter and modify. The findings from the analyses are of value to second language learners and can support further knowledge in the field of linguistics, specific to near-synonyms and collocations.

The purpose of this study is to examine what contemporary corpora can reveal about the use of the two adjectives evil and wicked. These two synonyms have been analysed using corpus linguistics in order to acquire results about the differences between them regarding frequency of use, as well as their collocating nouns. The results have also been analysed with a focus on gender perspectives. The study has a quantitative as well as a qualitative approach. The material investigated for this study consists of a corpus called The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The definitions of the two adjectives have also been searched within a few of the greater dictionaries. The findings reveal that the word evil is used to a greater extent by speakers and writers in different contexts in comparison to its synonym wicked. There are also significant differences between male and female nouns in adjective and noun collocations. The adjective evil is more frequently used to address male nouns, whereas its synonym wicked is more widely used as an attribute to female nouns. The differences are aligned with common gender stereotypes presented in previous studies and support the results regarding gender approaches in adjective and noun collocations.

Egyptology is a discipline in which new research and new approaches are continuously necessary and – in most cases – provided. In this constant flow of new research, some subject areas are left untouched. The lemmas aA and wr have continuously had a very homogenous translation although the morphological and syntactical differences are quite visible. The generally accepted translation of both lemmas as ‘great’ is very singular and raises the question of whether aA and wr should be considered synonyms or not. The study consists of two combined parts; a morpho-syntactical analysis of aA and wr and their conjugations and distributions as well as a semantic analysis on different expressions and sentences where both aA and wr occur with the same, or similar, syntactical structure. The aim is to give clarification to the correlation between the lemmas aA and wr and their interpretation. The study is not restricted to a specific time period, but regards linguistic developments as an important factor in the analysis. An important conclusion from this study is the clear, preferred use of wr as a qualifier for physical greatness, as opposed to aA which appears in contexts more related to metaphorical greatness. During Late Egyptian the opacity of the different uses of aA and wr increases and the differentiation becomes quite fuzzy.

The purpose of this essay is to investigate problems that arise when translating a German football text into Swedish. The qualitative study focuses on football terminology, as this is central to the language of football. Special attention was paid to synonymous terms, collocations, Anglicisms, metaphors, and metonymies. Various parallel texts and football dictionaries were consulted during the translation. Also, Koller's (2011) model of translation correspondences was used in order to systematize the findings. The analysis showed that when dealing with synonymous terms, different kinds of translation problems occurred due to correspondence type. For example, in cases where source text terms had only one correspondence in the target language, the target text inevitably became more repetitive than the source text. On the contrary, when a source-text term had several correspondences, many translation alternatives needed to be considered in order to choose the appropriate term in the specific target-text context. Concerning the translation of collocations, the analysis showed that interference may pose a problem even when translating into one's native language. As for the translation of Anglicisms, most of them could not be preserved in the target text, and, thus, needed to be replaced by existing Swedish equivalents. This occasionally turned out to be problematic, for instance when no direct equivalent could be found in the target language. On the contrary, many of the terms based on metaphorical concepts such as FOOTBALL IS WAR could be preserved, indicating that German and Swedish football language use this concept to a similar extent.

The aim of this thesis is to evaluate the usage of synonyms in teaching Russian language at high schools. The theoretical part of this thesis outlines the issues of synonyms and synonymous series from the linguistic (paradigmatic relations, semantics, stylistic) and linguodidactic point of view. The theoretical part also includes the issue of vocabulary from the didactic point of view. Furthermore, in the practical part, the diversity of synonyms used in curriculum of Russian language teaching are evaluated as well as the methods of demonstration and practising of such curriculum. In the final part of this thesis my own concepts for working with synonyms in teaching Russian language at high schools are suggested. KEYWORDS: synonyms, synonymous series, foreign languages, vocabulary, Russian language teaching