A Contrastive Linguistic Analysis of Arabic Conjunctive Nouns in their Syntactic Structures and their English Counterparts

This paper presents an endeavor to revive the role of contrastive linguistics in target language practice. It analyzes the use of the relative pronouns in English and contrasts it with that of their Arabic counterparts. The aim is to figure out the dissimilarities in their usage, which are normally taken to contribute to the associated difficulties in the two relevant applied linguistic fields of language learning/teaching and translation. Recognition of the spotted similarities and dissimilarities is particularly expected to benefit both English speaking learners of Arabic and Arabic speaking learners of English. This paper provides historical backgrounds of contrastive linguistics and the two languages under investigation. Then, it adopts the common methodological approach to contrastive analysis which starts with a thorough description of the same language category in both languages (relativization in this case), and ends with a contrast leading up to specifications of the differences. This study concludes with a handy listing of these ten contrasting specifications, and thus paving the way for relevant language users to make use of them to facilitate their target language practices.