A Study in the Form and Meaning of Subordination in English and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic

Abstract

The study deals contrastively with syntactic subordination in both Standard English (SE) and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA). This is done through the identification of the rules and principles that determine the formation of Arabic complex sentence vis-a-vis English complex sentence. The study aims at identifying general markers of subordination in both languages, and showing what effect(s) the arrangement(s) of independent and subordinate clauses within the sentence do have on the meaning expressed as well. The study also addresses the issue of how the various syntactic structures can contribute to the meaning of a sentence. These are supplemented by an analysis of the pragmatic/discourse functions correlated with the different types of subordinate clauses. Subordination is also assessed against the situational variables of age, sex, mode of discourse and formality.

The study consists of four chapters. Chapter ONE is an introduction, which presents the theoretical preliminaries and the analysis framework of the study. Chapter Two deals with the form and meaning of subordination in English. Chapter THREE tackles the form and meaning of subordination in Arabic. Chapter FOUR is 'Contrastive analysis and CONCLUSION', and presents the contrastive implications and sums up the findings of the research.