A Contrastive Study between English and Arabic Morphological Systems

The present paper tries to investigate the morphological processes which are applied to verbs in English and Arabic in an attempt to look for systematicity and directionality in these processes. Morphological processes are characterized by systematicity, i.e. rules which reflect specific patterns, or regularities, in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech.The analysis is based on the structural approach for the morph, morpheme, allomorph and morphological processes adopted by Bloomfield. The research is divided into sections: thentroduction, kinds of morphemes in English and Arabic, verb morphology in English, verb morphology in Arabic and the conclusion. Since the field of verb morphology is very wide this paper highlights the verb morphemes in English and Arabic and is confined to the analysis of the past morpheme for English and the imperfect morpheme for Arabic.