Delexical verbs in English and Arabic : a contrastive study

Dissertant

al-Khafaji, Huda Falih Hasan

Thesis advisor

al-Jumayli, Abd al-Latif A.

University

University of Baghdad

Faculty

College of Education for Human Sciences-Ibn Rushd

Department

Department of English

University Country

Iraq

Degree

Master

Degree Date

2004

English Abstract

Delexical verbs are a set of frequent verbs that exist in both Arabic and English.

These verbs tend to have less of a clear and independent meaning than less common verbs.

Delexical verbs are characterized by their reduced ability to contribute distinctively to the meaning of the sentence and most of the verbal idea is carried by their nominal complements.

English delexical verbs have been identified and classified by linguists.

Arabic delexical verbs, on the other hand, have perhaps not been studied yet.

Thus, part of the motivation for this investigation is the desire to explore the area of delexicalization in Arabic that has not been treated yet. The aim of this work is to investigate the semantic and syntactic features of delexical verbs in English and Arabic. It has been hypothesized in this work that delexicalization of verbs in English and Arabic occurs on the same bases and for similar syntactic and semantic motives. To test this hypothesis, the present work has employed the following procedure: delexical verbs firstly have been identified and studied in each language separately.

Next the results of the study in each language are contrasted. After the data have been analyzed and the results contrasted, it has been found out that there is a similarity between English delexical structures like have a walk and Arabic delexical structures like قام علي يمشي (Ali started walking) in the form of the complement which has the form of a verb.

The type of English and Arabic delexical verbs does not assign theta-roles to their complements.

Semantically, English and Arabic delexical verbs of type (I) differ in their aspectual denotation.

For instance, Arabic verbs denote the starting of the event which is specified by their complements.

Some of English delexical structures with verbs like give, take, got, do show brevity and termination of the event which is denoted by their complements. The second type of English and Arabic delexical verbs is those verbs whose complements are derived nouns.

Some of English delexical verbs like make, do, give as well as Arabic delexical verbs like (أجرى ‘made’, ألقى ‘threw’, أتخذ ‘took’, أولى ‘gave’) can take their complements as thematic arguments and they can assign theta-roles to their complements.

This type of verbs is not completely empty of meaning. Some intransitive delexical verbs in Arabic like (جاء ‘came’ and تم ‘finished) have no counterparts in English. Delexical structures with a passive meaning can be found in both languages.

Some of these structures like I had an attack and تعرضت لهجوم show a similar meaning inspite of the syntactic differences.

The reasons for using the delexical structures instead of their simple verb counterparts in English and Arabic are similar.

Main Subjects

Educational Sciences
Languages & Comparative Literature

No. of Pages

116

Table of Contents

• APA
• MLA
• AMA

Language

English

Data Type

Arab Theses

Record ID

BIM-737119