On Definiteness and Beyond : a Contrastive Analysis of Nominal Determination in English and Arabic (original) (raw)

This thesis offers a contrastive analysis of the notion of definiteness as conveyed by the system of the article in English and Standard Arabic. Definiteness and other notions associated with it are investigated semantically and syntactically in an attempt to discover how these two languages approach such notions and when the two languages converge and diverge in this respect. To this end, corpus analysis is chosen as a means to inspect these ideas. The corpus, The Brook Kerith, by the Irish writer, George Moore, is chosen for geo-historical and literary reasons: the story takes place in the Holy Land at the dawn of this Christian era. A contrastive analysis of the first chapter along with its translation is analyzed from a pragmatic and semantic perspective. The analysis is followed by statistical and computational analyses. It is found that the article the and the Arabic article al are used for seemingly the same purpose in the proportion of 76%. The occurrence of the article a/an is 96% consistent with indefiniteness in Arabic. However, the use of the zero article shows discrepancy as whether to use the article al or no article in Arabic. In the last analysis, the cognitive operations underlying usage in both languages are similar. The differences are on the level of the semiotic transformation of these deep operations. SABRA 8 On Definiteness and Beyond A Contrastive Study of Nominal Determination in English and Arabic SABRA Structure of the Thesis This thesis starts with an introduction dedicated to identifying the purpose and motive behind this study, highlighting its significance and the research questions. It is composed of two parts. The first part is the theoretical part. It consists of three chapters. The first chapter surveys linguistic research in the area of nominal determination. The second and the third chapters investigate definiteness and indefiniteness in English and Arabic via the system of the article respectively. The second part is concerned with corpus analysis and consists of three chapters as well. The first is allotted to introducing the corpus, The Brook Kerith, and putting it in its socio-cultural milieu. The second is the contrastive linguistic analysis of the corpus on the level of nominal determination in English and Arabic, after translating it. The third discusses the results by computational and statistical analysis of tables. The results are presented in different graphs, and examples for each result are provided. This part is concluded by answering the research question. This thesis also summarizes the whole study providing conclusions. It also offers some recommendations for further research. It provides a list of all figures and tables, an index, a section for appendices and a bibliography.