Analyticity and syntheticity in second language learning of standard Arabic: A corpus-based approach

A multifaceted word structure or morphological system is a feature of the Arabic language, which comprises of elements, for example, case and agreement markers, due to which, the ratio of synthetic word tokens is presumably enhanced. Nonetheless, the 'Syntheticity' of the language cannot necessarily be determined through the presence of the system. For this purpose, the percentage demonstrating the frequency of analytic word token needs to be explored. One of the top learned foreign languages globally is none other than Arabic. Therefore, this research aims to examine the impact of these L2 learners on Arabic, which means as to whether the L1 morphological system could contribute to their Arabic learning. For this purpose, this study counts and compares the token occurrences of synthetic word(s) with those of the analytic word(s) in Arabic texts through Arabic Learner Corpus (ALC). Furthermore, to explore the analyticity and synthesis of languages, Greenberg's (1960) system and Szmercsanyi's (2012) modified version was adopted in this paper.