الفهرس 
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Abstract
The study aims at exploring if the prototype theory is applicable when it comes to pinpointing the prototype of some studied semantic categories both in the Arab and English cultures. Recruiting Rosch’s prototype theory, this thesis tackles four English semantic categories: crimes, emotions, diseases and drinks and their Arabic equivalents ‘مشاعر-جرائم-مشروبات –أمراض’. For quantifying the hyponyms and co-hyponyms of the bootstrapped members, the web is used as corpus. The pattern ‘X such as’ is googled using the Google advanced search to restrict the research process to the desired year and the desired domain. Four domains are explored: .com, .org, .info and .edu’. The search is conducted over the last seven years from 2010 to 2016. The pattern is googled in each month of each year per domain.
Not only does the study focus on the application of the prototype theory to the semantic categories at play, but also it delves into the cultural implications of the findings of the results in an attempt to investigate the cross-cultural differences between Arabic and English-speaking worlds as regards conceptualizing prototyicality of the above mentioned categories.
Operationalizing so on the category ‘crimes’, the prototype member in Arabic is ‘قتل’ but in English it is ‘theft’. To the intellect of the English-speaking world, the archetypical crime pertains to money. However, ‘قتل’, which concordances with violence and shedding blood, strikes the Arabic mind before theft. More important, ”الزنا” is a topper family member, given the pertinent Islamic taboos, while in the English corpus it is not even declared among the most prototypical FMs.
The category ‘emotions’ characterizes a stark cultural difference between the two heterogeneous worlds. In the Arab culture, the overwhelming emotion is ‘خوف’, unlike ‘anger’ in the English corpus. ‘خوف’ in the concordance of the Arab corpus correlates to theological, political and economic predisposing factors –stipulating custody of thoughts and acts. However, anger is traced in people who are less controlled by ‘fear’.
The third semantic category ‘diseases’ is also symbolic of the cultural differences between the two languages. The most widespread disease in the European culture is ‘cancer’ but in the Arab culture it is ‘سكرى’. ‘سكرى’is related to the excessive intake of food, however, ‘Alzheimer’ is associated with the excessive intake of alcoholic beverages. Finally, in the ‘drinks’ category, the most consumed drinks in the European culture are related to mind-bending drinks such as ‘ alcohol, wine, champagne’ but in the Arab culture the most consumed drinks are mind-awakening such as ‘قهوة-شاى-حليب-كركدية’ . On the one hand, alcohol in the English culture is widely consumed as it is not forbidden in religion, unlike the Arab culture.
In using different domains in the search process, the results are greatly affected. The domains refer to different entities. The com mentality is concerned with people’s mentality in general, the info mentality is related to the body of knowledge regarding commodities or devices, the org mentality focuses on the organizational institutions, and the edu mentality is interested in research papers and studies. As shown in the analysis of the data in chapters two and three, the prototypicality of the FMs of the same category differ according to the mentality that is being applied.
All in all, the study manages to prove that the prototype is indeed effective in highlighting the prototype of the semantic categories in Arabic and English. It also establishes the fact that the prototype of the same category may differ from language to language. Moreover, the different domains affect the prototypicality of the FMs of the same category and finally it is supported with statistical data that there are cross-cultural differences between Arabic and English when it comes to the prototypicality of the FMs of the same category. Finally, the study recommends the application of the prototype theory to many studies as it is really handy in yielding a lot of plausible findings.