A Systemic functional exploration of translation: an appraisal corpus-linguistic approach

Firstly, by building on the missing, limited, misleading, ambiguous, and sometimes erroneous translations of some power-related appraisal adjectives found in English-Arabic dictionaries, the present study aims to contribute to the field of lexicography, and to serve as a guiding image to help translators and language tutors in understanding or choosing appraisal adjectives in English and Arabic. From even a quick glance through dictionaries, one can see that most common words have dozens of meanings and that it is impossible to try all of these meanings each time we read a word. This study offers some helping clues in uncovering patterns of usage and variation that cannot be obtained from consulting reference resources such as dictionaries and grammars. Secondly, this thesis is the first corpus-based study of its kind that adds a different scope to what might be called ‘appraisal theory’ applied to the Arabic language. It is surprising that linguistic researchers have not attempted to analyse ‘appraisal’ in the Arabic language given that there are a rich variety of Arabic lexical words available for describing evaluation. Though Arabic and English are two distinct languages, the study reveals remarkable similarities with respect to degree adverbs. Thirdly, the study also explores some crucial issues regarding ‘possibility’ and ‘necessity’ as two basic elements in the study of ‘modality’ – a major carrier of appraisal/evaluation. It is argued that translating the meaning of ‘modality’ has not been as comprehensively documented as most researchers have assumed. This thesis presents different choices for translating ‘possibility’ and ‘necessity’. In other words, this study provides different realizations at the level of modal meanings in Arabic, e.g. verbs, adverbs, adjectives and articles.