Exclamation in English and Arabic: a contrastive Study dr. Nadia Amin Hasan

International journal of Science Commerce and Humanities Volume No 2 No 2 February 2014
174 
Exclamation in English and Arabic: A Contrastive Study 
DR. Nadia Amin Hasan 
Department of English 
Faculty of Arts- Assiut University 
 
Abstract
Exclamation is considered till now one of the challenging topics, particularly its semantics. Studies 
on exclamation abound. Many studies on exclamation have compared different languages to English. 
Languages covered by these studies include English, Italian, Paduan, Brazilian Portuguese, Turkish, 
French, German, Setswana, Korean, Catalan, Vietnamese and Austronesian languages. On exclamation in 
Arabic and English little is said. This paper aims at surveying the coding of exclamation in standard Arabic. 
It aims, following Michaelis (2001) and Rett (2008) to examine the formal and the semantic features which 
jointly define exclamation in English and contrast them with those of Arabic. The paper is divided into three 
sections. The first begins with surveying different definitions of exclamations, a review of literature and the 
method of analysis follow. The second section concentrates on a contrastive analysis of the coding of 
exclamation in both English and Arabic. Thus, the Arabic material considered is examined according to the 
bearings of the different definitions of the terms exclamation and exclamatives. Also, an analysis will be 
conducted on Arabic according to the criteria set by linguists for identifying exclamation. Similarities and 
differences together with the findings and the conclusion of the analysis will be pointed out in the third 
section of the paper.
I.