2. Contrastive phonology
Difference between English and Arabic in
the basic sentence structure
Grammar differences
Sound combination
Word stress
Sound Elision
Conclusion
3. Contrastive phonology in linguistics, as
opposed to complementary distribution or
free variation, is the relationship between
two different elements, where both elements
are found in the same environment with a
change in meaning.
4. To understand sentence structures in the
English language, you must first have a
general understanding of the types of words
that are used to make sentences. Any
English sentence consists of three basic
components or parts. The basic structure of
the English sentence is
( S + V + O ).
6. Depending on the nature of the first word,
the Arabic sentence is divided into:
Nominal sentence
*In which the first
word is noun
Verbal sentence
*In which the first
word is verb
7. A nominal sentence requires no verb of any
kind. In general, it consists of two nouns , the
first is called 'Topic/Subject‘.
Although English sentences start with a noun,
this noun is called subject followed by the main
verb of sentence and an object (S+V+O).
The English sentence cannot be described as
grammatically correct unless it contains a main
verb (P.Ghazala,1995). On the other hand,
unlike English, Arabic has different types of
sentences.
8. Elements of verbal sentence are following:
1. S= Subject: the person or the thing that does
something.
She likes cats. ( "She" is the subject, and it is
a pronoun)
2. V= Verb: a word that expresses an action,
occurrence, or a state of being.
( "likes" is the verb )
3. O= Object: the person or the thing that
receives the action of the verb. ( "cats" is the
object )
9. The verb "to be" in present tense is not used in
Arabic, nor is "do." Arabic uses the single present
tense in place of English's simple and continuous
forms.
Arabic makes no difference between actions done
in the past with or without link to the present.
Modal verbs are absent in Arabic.
Adjectives come after nouns they describe.
Arabic follows a (S+O+V) pattern to sentences,
while English and many European languages use
the (S+V+O) pattern
10. English uses many more consonant clusters to
form words. Consonant clusters refer to
phoneme groupings, not alphabet letters.
Some two-consonant clusters are found at the
beginning of Arabic words, but Arabic does not
have any initial three-consonant clusters.
English also has numerous three- and four-
consonant clusters found at the ends of words,
whereas Arabic does not.
11. To compensate for this difference, Arabic
speakers often insert a short vowel sound to
break up consonant clusters when speaking
English.
For example they might say “nexist” instead
of “next” and “spilit” instead of “split”.
12. Word stress is very regular in Arabic. In English,
word stress changes frequently and can alter
the meaning and lexical category of a word. For
example, “'object” is a verb but “ob’-ject” is a
noun.
In Arabic, a change in stress is never used to
change the meaning of a word. Instead, a word
is pronounced with a different short vowel even
when it is spelled the same.
13. Elision is the dropping of a sound in the middle
of a word, or between words, when verbalizing
a sentence or phrase.
Some examples of elision are “cap'n” instead
of “captain” and “wanna” instead of “want
to.”
The elision of sounds is a common phonetic
feature of English that is not found in Arabic.
In Arabic, spelling is much more closely related
to sounds; and because of this, sounds are
rarely omitted.
14. To conclude, since English and Arabic are
two different languages from different origins
and families, they both have their own
grammar, vocabulary, style, and phonology.
In this paper, we discussed the basic
differences between two languages in details
(grammar differences, sound combination,
stress, elision). So you have to be able to
distinguish them and never mix their
characteristics as two amazing, different, rich
languages.
