Verb Inflection in English and Arabic: A Contrastive Analysis Study
Main Article Content
Abstract
Inflection, the change of word form to mark grammatical distinctions, occurs in a variety of grammatical classes: nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, etc. The purpose of the present paper is to describe the verb inflectional morphology in English and Arabic and to conduct a contrastive analysis of both of them. The research question which is put forth is: how do the verb inflectional morphology in English and Arabic differ from/resemble each other? To answer this question, a systematic descriptive comparative study is carried out with a unique focus on the verb inflectional categories. Eventually, it was found that the Arabic verb inflectional morphology is richer and varied from that of the English. Such a study has implications in fields like foreign language teaching/learning, translation, electronic dictionaries, natural language processing, and the like.
Article Details
References
Al-jarf, R. A (1994). Contrastive Analysis of English and Arabic Morphology for Translation Students. Riyadh: Al-Obeikkan Printing Press.
Al-Shujairi, Y. B. J., Muhammed, A., & Almahammed, Y. S. O. (2015). Transitivity and intransitivity in English and Arabic: A comparative study. International Journal of Linguistics, 7(6), 38-52.
Bickel, B., & Nichols, J. (2001). Syntactic ergativity in light verb complements. In Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (Vol. 27, pp. 39-52). Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Brown, K. (2005). Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (Vol. 1). Elsevier.
Bybee, J. L. (1985). Morphology: A study of the relation between meaning and form. Philadelphia: Benjamins Publishing.
Catford, C.J. & Palmer, J.(1974). A contrastive Study of English and Arabic. California: Defense Language Institute.
Eades, D. (2014). Syncretism in the verbal morphology of the Modern South Arabian Languages. In Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, 44, 19-27.
Guilati, I. (2009). Quissato Elirab [The Story of Conjugation].Dar Elhouda: Ain M’lila.
Matthews, P.H. (1974) Morphology: An Introduction to the Theory of WordStructure, Cambridge: CUP.
Mosel, U. (1980). Syntactic categories in Sibawaihi's «Kitab». Histoire Epistémologie Langage, 2(1), 27-37.
Neme, A. (2020). An Arabic language resource for computational morphology based on the Semitic model (Doctoral dissertation, Université Paris-Est).
Neme, A. A., & Laporte, E. (2013). Pattern-and-root inflectional morphology: the Arabic broken plural. Language Sciences, 40, 221-250.
Quirk, R. (2010). A comprehensive grammar of the English language. Pearson Education India.
Salim, J. A. (2013). A contrastive study of English-Arabic noun morphology. International Journal of English Linguistics, 3(3), 122.
Wright, W. (1996). A Grammar of the Arabic Language. Ed 3.Vol1. Beirut: Librairie du Liban.