The verb-noun agreement in english and arabic

Abstract

© Journal of Language and Literature. This article deals with comparing two quite different languages - English and Arabic - in the field of the verb quantity. Our research involves morphology, syntax and semantics. The hypothesis that richer morphology reduces notional effects during agreement production within and across languages is the central idea of this study. In the course of time the English language has changed from grammatical into lexical one and currently has few morphological means to express different grammatical meanings but more hidden notional features involved in subject-verb agreement. The notional features are manifested in the so-called "agreement attraction", the cases of imbalance in subject-predicate and collective-verb agreement. The graphic style of thinking of the Arabs penetrates into the verb number category, displayed by the diversity of morphological markers and peculiar full person-number-gender or partial person-gender agreement depending on the sentence word order and subject's belonging to the category of Human or non-Human nouns. Verb number phenomenon is highly complex, but despite this complexity it is systematic.