Negation in English, Arabic and Kurdish: A Contrastive Study

Abstract

The present study focuses on the points of similarities and differences found in English, Arabic and Kurdish languages in terms of negation. The three languages belong to different families and they all exist in the researchers own country (Iraq). Arabic is spoken natively in the middle, the western and the southern parts. Kurdish is spoken natively in the northern part called Kurdistan Region. English is a foreign language in all parts of Iraq. All the three languages under study are taught as school subjects all over Iraq in general and higher education. Negation is dealt with in the three languages mentioned above in terms of word negation and sentence negation. Word negation discusses the way in which a word is negated, i.e., how prefixes and suffixes are used to reverse the meaning of the word an affix is added to. Sentence negation is dealt with in terms of how the affirmative declarative sentence is negated in all the three languages mentioned above. Findings show that negation in the three languages under examination is different parametrically.