Contrastive Rhetoric Between Arabic and English Languages

It is universally known that any writer is going to have difficulty when he tries to convey a thought in a new language. Sometimes it is difficult even between dialects in the same base language. The problems that occur to a person while writing in a second language due to language and cultural differences are termed contrastive rhetoric. Connor simply defines “contrastive rhetoric that maintains language and writing as cultural phenomena” (Connor 5). If two cultures vary greatly, then it would make sense that writers who try to cross that cultural and language barrier would have a more daunting task than normal. In the case of Arabic and English native speakers, there are numerous conventional differences in the two languages that make the rhetoric very contrastive when trying to write in a second language. Because the cultures are very distinct from one another and due to the vast structural differences within both the spoken and written discourse, writers will face specific challenges in trying to make themselves understood to natives of the opposite culture.

The basic premise of contrastive rhetoric studies is to determine both: why there are differences among languages in general and to try and reach a conclusion as to how those differences can be mitigated. “The basic premise of…Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis is that language learning can be more successful when the two languages – the native and the foreign – are similar. Some linguists call this situation positive transfer” (Al-Sibai). This idea of positive transfer happens between languages in which the base is similar such as German and English or Spanish and French, but it does not hold for the Semitic languages and the Romantic languages or the Germanic ones. Basic ...

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Both sentence constructions are used in Standard and Classical Arabic. Whereas English follow only one sentence construction as it must begin with an entity that does the action in the sentence, subject.

Works Cited

Al-Qahtani, Abdulkhaleq. A Contrastive Rhetoric Study of Arabic and English Research Article Introductions. Diss. Oklahoma State University, 2006. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2006. Print.

Al-Sibai, Dina M. “Not to Be: The Decline of Contrastive Analysis Pedagogy.” 04 Jan. 2011. Web.

Connor, Ulla. “New Directions in Contrastive Rhetoric.” TESOL Quarterly, 36.4 (2002). 493-510. Print.

Connor, Ulla. Contrastive Rhetoric: Cross-Cultural Aspects of Second-Language Writing. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Print.

Thomason, Sarah G. ”Arabic in Contact with other Languages.” University of Michigan. 2009. 23 Feb. 2011. Web.