A Contrastive Study on the Syntactic Structure of Standard English and Standard Arabic Determiner Phrase

Abstract

The determiner phrase is a syntactic category that appears inside the noun phrase and makes it definite or indefinite or quantifies it. The present study has found wide parametric differences between the English and Arabic determiner phrases in terms of the inflectional features, the syntactic distribution of determiners and the word order of the determiner phrase itself. In English, the determiner phrase generally precedes the head noun or its premodifying adjectival phrase, with very few exceptions where some determiners may appear after the head noun. In Arabic, parts of the determiner phrase precede the head noun and parts of it must appear after the head noun or after its postmodifying adjectival phrase creating a discontinuous determiner phrase. In English, a few determiners may be postposed by transformation after the head noun. In Arabic, a large number of determiners may appear after the head noun or after its postmodifying adjectival phrase. Because of the idiosyncratic syntactic distribution of the subclasses of English and Arabic determiners, the study has found that the syntactic features of each determinative are better listed in the strict subcategorization of the lexical entry of each determinative and let the categorial rules describe their order within the determiner phrase and within the noun phrase.