The Semantic Scope of Negation in English and Arabic: A Comparative Study
- Details
- Category: English Language and Literature
- Published: Thursday, 10 May 2012 03:00
- Written by Israa J. El-Ma’aitah
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Abstract
The scope of negation in English and Arabic
( A contrastive study )
Israa J. El-Ma’aitah
Mu’tah University, 2011
This is a contrastive study of the semantic scope of negation in English and Arabic. It investigates how similar or how different the meanings of the negative ambiguous sentences are in English and Arabic in their syntactic and semantic behavior. Since modals have unexpected behavior under negation, this study is concerned with the scope of modal negation. The researcher studies the negation of other syntactic aspects such as quantifiers, adverbials, subordinate clauses, prepositional phrases and others with reference to intonation to show how important it is to reduce ambiguity in certain negated sentences dealing with it as a grammatical phenomenon not as a phonological one.
In order to fulfill this objective, this study is undertaken with the general aim of what is called inductive approach. The researcher adopted the contrastive analysis in order to explore the points of similarities and the points of differences between the two selected contrasted categories (the scope of English and Arabic negation).
The findings show that there are considerable number of similarities and differences of the scope of negation in English and Arabic. More importantly, the results show that the scope of modal auxiliaries negation differs in both languages in that in Arabic it is obvious and is easy to perceive straightway rather than in English. It is marked, in Arabic, by the position of the negative particle which negates whatever follows it while in English there is no formal way to define whether it is the main verb or the modal auxiliary that is negated. The results also show that intonation plays a role in determining the scope of negation in English and Arabic sentences.