Contrastive phonology

Difference between English and Arabic in the basic sentence structure

Grammar differences

Sound combination

Word stress

Sound Elision

Conclusion

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.

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 ).

Subject+verb

The boy plays

Subject+verb+adverb

The boy ran quickly

Subject+verb+noun

The boy is a student

Subject+verb+adjective

The girl is pretty

Subject+verb+object

John kicks the ball

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

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.

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 )

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

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.