THE USE OF PREPOSITIONS IN ARABIC AND ENGLISH: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

Abstract

Arabic and English are derived from different language families. While Arabic belongs to the Semitic family, English belongs to Germanic languages (Alhaj, 2015). Consequently, these two languages are supposed to have dissimilar prepositional structures. The methodology used in this study to comprehend these variances and resemblances regarding prepositions in Arabic and English, the researcher conducted a comparative study among these two prepositional systems. The objective of this paper is not to prove or disprove this claim. Its main focus is finding out how this syntactic feature is dealt with in English and Arabic in general and the contrast in the use of prepositions in both languages. To achieve this aim, the research makes use of the English categories of prepositions and gives the Arabic equivalents, in some cases, there is no Arabic equivalent because English prepositions are more than Arabic ones.