In recent months, many governments have announced COVID-19 vaccination programs and plans to help end the crises the world has been facing since the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic. In Saudi Arabia, the Ministry of Health called for citizens and residents to take up the vaccine as an essential step to return life to normal. However, the take-up calls were made in the face of profound disagreements on social media platforms and online networks about the value and efficacy of the vaccines. Thus, this study seeks to explore the responses of Saudi citizens to the COVID-19 vaccines and their sentiments about being vaccinated using opinion mining methods to analyze data extracted from Twitter, the most widely used social media network in Saudi Arabia. A corpus of 37,467 tweets was built. Vector space classification (VSC) methods were used to group and categorize the selected tweets based on their linguistic content, classifying the attitudes and responses of the users into three defined categories: positive, negative, and neutral. The lexical semantic properties of the posts show a prevalence of negative responses. This indicates that health departments need to ensure citizens are equipped with accurate, evidence-based information and key facts about the COVID-19 vaccines to help them make appropriate decisions when it comes to being vaccinated. Although the study is limited to the analysis of attitudes of people to the COVID-19 vaccines in Saudi Arabia, it has clear implications for the application of opinion mining using computational linguistic methods in Arabic.

ResumenEste trabajo pretende describir y analizar el fenómeno de la ausencia de verbo copulativo en tiempo presente en las oraciones sin verbo en árabe. Por regla general, se asume que, en árabe, las oraciones sin verbo contienen un verbo copulativo nulo o elidido. Este estudio rebate dicho supuesto y propone que, en consonancia con las bases de la sintaxis minimista (expresadas inicialmente en Chomsky 1993Chomsky , 1995, las oraciones sin verbo revelan ausencia de V y, por lo tanto, de VP. La razón es que la estructura objeto de estudio presenta dos posibilidades para expresar el tiempo presente: una mediante la ausencia de verbo, y otra que conlleva la presencia de verbo copulativo con fl exión de tiempo.Palabras clave: oración sin verbo, verbo copulativo nulo, predicación, caso. AbstractThe aim of this paper is to describe and analyze the absence of present tense verbal copula in Arabic verbless sentences. The Standard assumption is that Arabic verbless sentences contain a null or deleted copula. The present study argues contra this assumption. It proposes, building on the framework of minimalist syntax (fi rst proposed by Chomsky 1993Chomsky , 1995, that there is no V and hence no VP in verbless sentences since the relevant construction has two alternatives to express the present tense interpretation: one is achieved without a verb and the other with a verb (copula) infl ected for tense.Keywords: Verbless sentence, null copula, predication, Case. RésuméLe but de cet exposé est de décrire et d'examiner l'absense des verbes de connexion dans les phrases arabiques sans verbes. La supposition habituelle est que les phrase arabiques contiennent un verbe de connexion insignifi ant ou supprimé. Les études récentes sont contre cette supposition. Ils suggèrent, en se basant sur le cadre de la syntaxe minimaliste(d'abbord avancé par Chomsky 1993,1995) qu'il n'y a pas de V et donc de VP dans les phrases sans verbes,car la construction approprié a deux façon alternatives d'exprimer l'interprétation du temps au present. L'un est accompli sans le verbe et l'autre avec un verbe infl échi pour le temps.

The prime concern of this paper is to introduce the art of the Minimalist Program to the theory of grammar. Besides presenting the basic principles and techniques that make this new theory

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