Volume 11, Number 5

A Contrastive Study of the Negation Morphemes ( English, Kurdish and Arabic)

  Authors

Safia Zivingi, Damascus University (2), Syria

  Abstract

This paper is studying the problems facing languages (English, Kurdish, and Arabic) due to the lack of symmetry between the negation morphemes in these languages, which differ in their numbers, the specifics of their uses, and the multiplicity of their meanings, at the two levels: general language and science terms. The negation morphemes in the Arabic and Kurdish languages are located at the beginning of the word as prefixes. That is, neither of them has infixes or suffixes that indicate the negative (morphologically), that is, at the level of the word or the lexical unit, and are grammatically at the level of the sentence. These negation morphemes may enter the middle of the sentence in Kurdish, but in Arabic, the negation morphemes are located at the forefront of the sentence. Most of the negation affixes in English are also prefixes, and a few are the suffixes denoting negation, the most prominent of which is (-less); English is also devoid of negation infixes. The lack of equivalence between the negation morphemes between quantitative and qualitative languages leads to chaos and disorder when transferred between languages. This necessitates the need to establish rules regulating the work of these multiple morphemes for the function of negation, at morphological structure, syntactic, semantic features, and the nature of their uses, at the level of the language itself, and at the level of contrastive between the sending and receiving languages.

  Keywords

Multiplicity, symmetry, equivalence, regulating, features, terms. quantitatively & qualitatively.