A Comparative Study of Arabic Motion Verbs to their English Counterparts

Abstract

This paper examines some semantics aspects of Arabic motion verbs compared to their English counterparts. Although both languages belong to different remote families, both languages share some common features about Motion especially on the idea of locomotors vs. non-locomotors (translative and non-translative movement). A lexically-semantic comparison is drawn between motion verbs in both languages in terms of suggested semantic components such as Motion itself, Manner, Directionality, Path, Fictive, and Motion. The researchers used resources such as encyclopedias, library references books specially Mu’jam Lisan AL-Arab, Al-Mu'jam Al-Waseet, English dictionaries specially Oxford, Webster, and Longman, web sites to collect data of motion verbs under discussion. The paper concludes that the semantics components of Arabic verbs are quite similar to their English counterparts, but Arabic verbs differ greatly from English verbs in the notions that can be lexicalized.