Bridging explicitness gaps between English and Arabic

Abstract EN

Researchers who are concerned with contrastive studies between English and Arabic often consider Arabic as a highly explicative language, whereas English as intrinsically implicative; a phenomenon which might relate to socio-cultural factors.

This does not only take place at the lexical, i.

e.

, semantic level, but at the grammatical, mainly the syntactic level too.

The present study tries to test the validity of the above mentioned argument and minimize the explicitness gaps by offering deeper analysis to uncover the so long overlooked aspects which bring these two languages to some common grounds.

The procedure to be adopted is to tackle some selected contrastive areas between the targeted languages on a micro-linguistic level of analysis.

The study has reached some conclusions among which that the gap between English and Arabic concerning the consonant phonemic system is partially bridgeable because some English phonemes are used allophonically by means of the universal phonological process 'assimilation'.

Similarly, the syntactic gap between the two languages concerning number, namely that English distinguishes between singular and plural, while Arabic considers a third type, which is the dual, is also partially bridged by some English lexical items which have dual reference.

The study suggests also that the availability of some invariable nouns in Arabic bridges the gap of the ence of the invariable nouns in Arabic.

The syntactic gap concerning case between these two languages is also bridgeable by means of that process which maximizes the requirements of satisfying word order in Arabic, similar to that of English.