Simple Sentence Structure of Standard Arabic Language and Standard English Language: A Contrastive Study

Abstract

Purpose: To contrast and compare the simple sentence structure in the form of statement of both Standard Arabic SA and English SE Languages on the basis of Lado’s Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis CAH.
Method: 500 sentences in Standard Arabic and 500 sentences in Standard English were collected randomly from published academic sources in both languages where all of them are simple and in some cases a compound or complex sentence is broken to have simple sentences. Lado’s approach and steps for contrasting two linguistic systems were identically followed: selection of source language SL (Arabic) and target language TL (English), description, comparison and prediction of potential problems classified according to the degree of importance.
Results: Results indicated that SA is a free-word-order system in the case of structuring a simple sentence in the form of statement compared to the SE which proved a fixed-word-order language. Additionally and predictively, learners of both Arabic and English as foreign language (AFL), (EFL) and as Second language (ASL), (ESL) have difficulties when attempting to write a sentence. For learners of English it is more difficult as they do not have verbal, nominal and equational sentences in their written language, so they move from one type to three or [four] types of sentences in the form of statement. For Arab learners, they have serious problems in subject-verb agreement but which was not the researcher’s concern. Other problems according to this research-paper could be in translation in both cases but it is more in the case of Arab learners especially in the case of the verb (Be).
Conclusions: SA allows four types of simple sentence in the form of statement with some restrictions and rules for each case (nominal, verbal, equational, and non-verbal), whereas English allows only one type which is nominal.