Lexemes and Semantic Relations in English and Arabic: A Contrastive Study

Abstract

Communicating via language is an important property of human beings. Usually one does not think of the relations between words. But from linguistic perspective, the words are not single units. They are linked to each other by semantic and formal relations. The focus of this paper is on different lexemes in English and Arabic. So, this research aims to investigate the major errors which EFL students encounter by the misuse of different lexemes. This is achieved through using the elicitation instrument by implementing two tests. A pretest and a posttest for the sixth-grade students. First the students face problems in dealing with homonyms, synonyms, antonyms and homophones as a result of negative interference between the two languages, Arabic and English. After extensive training the students get good results. They are able to overcome the ambiguity of these lexemes. This shows the importance of learning lexemes in both languages as this simplifies the communication and identifies the areas of ambiguity.