A Contrastive Study of Ellipsis in English and Arabic: The Case of Ellipted Forms of Verb

Abstract

The present study is about one of the forms of ellipsis, which is the ellipted verbs in English and Arabic. Ellipsis is a syntactic linguistic phenomenon that exists in all languages. Ellipsis is used to avoid repeated elements unnecessary or boring and to achieve a more appropriate economy of state-ment. To make a comparison between English and Arabic it is hypothesized that: 1. Meaning is encoded by certain forms of ellipted forms of verbs which might be similar in both languages. 2. Both languages show differences in ellipted forms of verbs. The aim of this study is to examine the form of verb ellipsis in English and Arabic though there are many other forms of ellipsis in both languages. Also it deals with the cross-syntactic constructions which are supposed to be dif¬ferent in both languages. The study concludes that ellipsis is significant in both languages. English has four forms of ellipted verb: the lexical verb, the lexical verb and auxiliary verb, the verb and subject complement, and the verb and di¬rect object. On the other hand, Arabic has two ellipted forms of verb and both forms occur with lexical verb.