Probability meaning of some English and Arabic verbs in some religious texts : a contrastive study

Abstract EN

The study of meaning represents one of the new bearings in linguistics generally and contrastive linguistics and analysis particularly.

Modality is a rich semantic concept which involves various meanings according to the contexts in which the different types of verbs are used.

Probability is one of these mea-nines that may be expressed by some verbs in English and Arabic languages.

The fact is that these verbs in the two languages might be different in form, but to some extent similar in content.

The focus in this work is on verbs, because of the verbs' central role in a sentence Two hypotheses have been tested throughout this study : first , the meaning of probability might be existent in both languages ; second , those verbs that may convey the meaning of probability under different titles such as : verbs of probability in English and those in Arabic .

The study attempts to prove throughout the analyses of some of the religious texts that these verbs are equivalent to each other for the purposes of contrastive study as well as translation.

The study falls in four Sections : Section one is an introduction to the whole work ; Section two is a theoretical one which discusses the meanings of modality and probability in English and Arabic respectively.

Many of the various semantic classifications of verbs of probability have been presented from some references, in English Aziz's classification for degrees of probability (1992) have been the major concern and in Arabic Muheisin's classification (2004) has been singled out Section three is an analytic one which discusses the analyses of fourteen religious text (i.e.

seven from the Holy Bible-New Testament and the same of the Glorious Quran respectively) depending on the gradation of degrees of probability in the arrangement of these texts .

Section four gives the results (conclusions), recommendations and suggestions.