A Comparative Study of the Sound Alternations of English and Arabic Articles

Abstract

Article is a type of determiner which precedes the noun to indicate the references being made to make the noun become clear. In applying the articles with noun, there are some sound alternations occurred. The analysis of the sound alternation is applied on the English and Arabic articles. The theory used in this research is generative phonology and comparative analysis theory. The discussion is intended to know phonologically the sound alternation of the articles of both languages and to know the similarities and the ifferences of them. Library research is used to find out the relevant concepts to the theoretical framework of the research. The data resources are taken from the English pronouncing dictionary as the data resources of English and the Arabic dictionary as the data resources of Arabic. The descriptive method is used to describe the presented data, while the comparative method is used to know the similarities and the differences of the sound alternation of English and Arabic articles. Phonological rule is used to find the appropriate rule in analyzing the underlying representation. Derivational process is used to generate the underlying representation into the phonetic representation. The result of this research indicates that there are some similarities and differences especially in the assimilation rule application according to the environment of the sound alternation of English and Arabic articles.