A Contrastive Analysis of Negation Between Arabic and English with Reference to Quranic Translation

Abstract

Abstract This study is a contrastive analysis between Arabic and English in terms of the semantic scope of negation . It is aimed at showing the degrees of similarity and difference between English and Arabic regarding the meanings involved in negative ambiguous sentences and figuring out their behaviour syntactically and semantically. The behaviour of modals is non-expectable under negation , the study is , therefore; focused on investigating the scope of negation of modals . The researcher also investigates negation that exists in such syntactic aspects as adverbials, quantifiers , subordinate clauses, prepositional phrases and others as well as touching upon intonation in order to highlight the importance of reducing the degree of ambiguity involved in specific negated sentences . Hence the study is dealing with the phenomenon as a grammatical not a phonological one. The contrastive analysis adopted in this research aims at exploring how far the two selected categories being contrasted (the scope of English and Arabic negation) are similar or different and what their points of similarity and difference are. The findings show that there are considerable number of similarities and differences in the scope of negation in English and Arabic. The findings reached show that the scope of negation in English and Arabic involves a noticeable number of similarities and differences. The results show that the two languages are different in terms of the scope of negation in modal auxiliaries for it is more obvious and can be more easily perceived in Arabic than in English. In Arabic the negative particle negates the part of the sentence that follows it while in English, it is characterized by absence of any formal way to identify whether it is the main verb or the modal auxiliary that is negated. The role played by intonation in determining the scope of negation in English and Arabic sentences is also shown by the results .