A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE SOUND ALTERNATIONS OF ENGLISH AND ARABIC ARTICLES

Abstract

A Comparative Study of the Sound Alternations of English and Arabic Articles; Mu’rifah, 090110101118; 2013: 86 pages; English Department, Faculty of Letters, Jember University. Sound alternation is a way of expressing grammatical categories which consists in changing a sound. It may occur in any languages. This thesis discusses about that problem which is applied in two languages namely English and Arabic and then comparing them in the sound alternation’s application. Because this thesis discusses about two main points, they are about the sound alternations of two languages and the comparison between those two languages, it uses two theories. They are generative phonology theory and comparative analysis theory. This thesis is intended to describe phonologically the sound alternations which occur in the English and Arabic and compare them to know the similarities and the differences of them. Library research is used in collecting data in this thesis because all of the data and analysis are taken from written materials. The descriptive method is used to describe the presented data, while the comparative method is used to know the similarities and the differences between the sound alternations in English and Arabic articles. After finding the Underlying Representation based on the allophones of the articles, the sound alternations are described by phonological rules, and the derivational process is used to generate from the Underlying Representation to the Phonetic Representation. The result of this thesis indicates that there are some similarities and differences in the sound alternations of both English and Arabic articles. The similarities are that both English and Arabic definite articles apply assimilation rule and unchanged rule as the appropriate rule in derivational process. Furthermore, the differences of them are that the indefinite articles of English apply insertion rule and unchanged rule, while Arabic does not apply any rule to its indefinite articles. Arabic has only the marker in indefiniteness and has no sound alternation occurs. The allophones of English definite article are only two namely /ðə/ and /ðɪ/, while there are 14 allophones of Arabic definite article, they are /ʌl/, /ʌt/, /ʌѲ/, /ʌd/, /ʌð/, /ʌr/, /ʌz/, /ʌs/, /ʌʃ/, /ʌsɭ/, /ʌdɭ/, /ʌtɭ/, /ʌðɭ/ and /ʌn/. The discussion of the definite article of Arabic is more complex than definite article of English because the applied rules are also more complex. In conclusion, sound alternations occur in English and Arabic, and may be in other languages, but in applying the rules which make the sound alternations may be the same and may be different. Studying the differences of some languages in this case is important in order to be aware in pronouncing them correctly