A contrastive study of certain syntactic aspects in English and Arabic

Abstract EN

One of the main undertakings of the youthful human being is to become familiar with the language of the general public into which the individual is conceived.

Typically, it takes numerous years to obtain the dominance of language expected of mature adult.

But, methods of studying languages are getting developed to help people to get more information about languages (whether their L1 or other languages they are interested in) with less effort and time.

One of the methods is contrastive study.

Studies of this kind help people with interest to know more about languages by seeing the differences and similarities between their elements.

Moreover, a contrastive analysis of syntactic aspects of languages shows how languages share some universal syntactic properties, for example VP is seen to be universal, and, at the same time, how generating the constituents may vary substantially.

The current research selects two important syntactic aspects, namely NP and VP, to investigate as they are seen to be two of the main constituents of the two languages studied, English and Arabic.

A description of each language's NP and VP system is provided starting from the English and ending with the Arabic.

Later, a comparison is done to figure out the differences and the similarities between the two systems.

Conclusions are stated at the end of the One of the main undertakings of the youthful human being is to become familiar with the language of the general public into which the individual is conceived.

Typically, it takes numerous years to obtain the dominance of language expected of mature adult.

But, methods of studying languages are getting developed to help people to get more information about languages (whether their L1 or other languages they are interested in) with less effort and time.

One of the methods is contrastive study.

Studies of this kind help people with interest to know more about languages by seeing the differences and similarities between their elements.

Moreover, a contrastive analysis of syntactic aspects of languages shows how languages share some universal syntactic properties, for example VP is seen to be universal, and, at the same time, how generating the constituents may vary substantially.

The current research selects two important syntactic aspects, namely NP and VP, to investigate as they are seen to be two of the main constituents of the two languages studied, English and Arabic.

A description of each language's NP and VP system is provided starting from the English and ending with the Arabic.

Later, a comparison is done to figure out the differences and the similarities between the two systems.

Conclusions are stated at the end of the research.