Studying Pilgrimage-Tourism Units in Modern Linguistics: An Evidence-Based Analytical Framework for Arabic Material

Studies of tourism vocabulary often collect travel-related names without establishing what a unit designates, how it is built and in which situation it is used. The problem is acute in pilgrimage tourism, where ritual acts, sacred places, pilgrim status and organisational services coexist within one reality, although not every unit that expresses them carries religious meaning. To develop an analytical framework for studying pilgrimage-tourism units in Arabic by specifying what each type of scholarly source can and cannot demonstrate. A qualitative, source-based comparative-analytical design was applied to twenty publications from tourism studies, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, Uzbek terminology research, Arabic morphology and grammar, lexical semantics and linguistic-landscape research. Sources were classified by function, tested feature and limit of inference; the pair taṣrīḥ / taṣrīḥ al-ʿumra served as a minimal illustration. (1) Five source types differ systematically in evidential scope. (2) The boundary of a domain must be separated from the boundary of meaning. (3) A unit is delimited by nominative integrity rather than by word count or sentence completeness. (4) Five typical claims (domain assignment, synonymy, semantic shift, derivation, translation equivalence) each require distinct minimal evidence. (5) A working definition of pilgrimage-tourism units is proposed. The framework protects analysis from transferring evidence across kinds and offers a basis for corpus-based research on Arabic pilgrimage lexis and for translation practice.