Journal Article

Rendering English Structural Ambiguity into Arabic and the Role of Transformational Syntax along with Arabic Morphology

Tawfik, Afnan Abdelgawad

2022

Overview

The main objective of this paper is to show how the theory of transformational syntax along with Arabic morphological markers can contribute to the translation of English structural ambiguity into Arabic. The analysis of a sample of English structurally ambiguous constructions adopted in this study highlights the significant role of transformational syntax in rendering English structural ambiguity into Arabic. The findings have shown that by applying the surface and deep structure notions, it is evident that each ambiguous construction allows for two different structural representations; and each representation is associated with a different meaning. Thus, the two meanings of these ambiguous constructions are visualized easily by employing tree diagrams. The findings have also shown that only few English ambiguous constructions can be rendered into Arabic ambiguous counterparts, while the majority of these constructions cannot be rendered into Arabic ambiguous counterparts. Specifically, only 27% of the English ambiguous constructions included in this study can be rendered into Arabic ambiguous counterparts, whereas 73% of these constructions cannot be rendered into Arabic ambiguous counterparts. In other words, most of the English structural ambiguity cases are untranslatable into Arabic ambiguous counterparts. This highlights the remarkable role of the productive Arabic morphology. Hopefully, these findings can lead to guidelines which can help in both manual and machine translation.

• Publisher: جامعة أسيوط - كلية الآداب
• Subject: التراكيب الإنجليزية / اللغة العربية / المرادفات العربية / النحو والصرف