A Tagmemic Analysis of Subject-Verb Agreement in English and Arabic in Selected Quranic Texts : A Contrastive Study

Abstract

The current study is a contrastive analysis devoted to check the subject–verb agreement in English and Arabic to find out the points of similarities and differences between the two languages at sentence level. In order for that to happen, a grammatical theoretical framework, namely, Pike's Tagmemic Theory, is applied to some selected Quranic Texts, in an attempt, to describe the subject–verb agreement in both languages. Tagmemic theory deals primarily with grammatical analysis, associated with Kenneth Lee Pike. It is an branch of structuralism. But Structuralism concentrated only on form and ignored functions of a linguistic form. Tagmemics mixes together the form and the function of a linguistic entity (Pike and Pike,1977:20). According to Cook and Walter (1969:15), a tagmeme is "the relation between a functional slot with the class of items that fill that slot. This unit is not only the denotation of a form unit, as in other grammatical models, but it consists of a function and form." However, applying Pike's Tagmemic Theory, the results of the study show that the differences between Arabic and English subject-verb agreement mostly occur in the levels of number, gender and position.