Dilworth Parkinson is a Professor of Arabic. He received his MA and PhD in Arabic Linguistics from the University of Michigan, in 1976 and 1982 respectively.

He finished his work on Using Arabic Synonyms, a vocabularly building book for advanced students published in the Cambridge University Press series. This book provides students with a common word they probably know (like 'house') and then gives a number of common synonyms (like 'home', 'mansion', etc.) with authentic citations for each entry. The citations are based on a large corpus of newspaper Arabic, and mining them involves the use of some of the corpus tools that he has been developing.

He is currently developing a website, arabiCorpus.byu.edu, which is being designed to allow students and scholars to search large untagged Arabic corpora for words and structures. It provides information on word frequency, citations giving 10 words before and 10 words after, and information on collocates of the word in question. Some regular expression searching is also possible, allowing the user to find larger structures and grammatical patterns.

He took a fairly large group of students to Alexandria, Egypt for an advanced Intensive Arabic Language Study Abroad experience during Fall Semester, 2004 (September-December). For future study abroad program information, click on International Study Programs at the Kennedy Center website (kennedy.byu.edu).

Recent Publications

• "Future Variability: A Corpus Study of Arabic Future Particles." Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XV. Edited by Dilworth Parkinson amd Samira Farwaneh. 2003. pp. 191-211.
• "Verbal Features of Oral Fusha Performances in Cairo." International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 163, 2003. Special Issue: Arabic Sociolinguistics as Viewed by Western Arabists, Issue Editor: Kirk Belnap. pp. 27-41.
• Using Arabic Synonyms. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, England, 2005. 688 pages
• "Sentence Subject Agreement Variation." Accepted for publication in 2006.