Comparative study on Morphological Typology between English and Arabic focusing on Past Formation

ABSTRACT

Comparative study is the study of comparison. It compares two or more things. It aims to investigate the similarities and the differences of things which are compared. This study focuses of the comparison of morphological typology between English and Arabic focusing on past formation. This study is very important to be conducted because by using comparative study, we can describe the past formation of English and Arabic. Besides that, we can also determine the morphological typology of both languages. Then, we can investigate the similarities and differences between English and Arabic, especially on past formation.

This study aims to answer the questions: (1) What are the rules of past formation applied in English and Arabic?; (2) What are the morphological typologies of the formation? (3) What are the similarities and differences between past formation in English and Arabic? This study uses descriptive qualitative design because the purposes of this study are to describe and understand the rules of past formations in morphological typology and the comparison of English and Arabic. The data of this study are taken from “Interchange” for English and “Arabiyah Baina Yadaik” for Arabic. Therefore, the data are taken from two books.The techniques of data collection are reading and understanding the books, and selecting the relevant data. Then, the data are classified, analyzed, and discussed before the findings are finally concluded.

The findings of the study are (1) the rule of past formation in English is suffix addition, zero morph, and suppletion, while in Arabic is the basic verb of Arabic is in the form of past (fi’il madhi); (2) English and Arabic include agglutinating language because in forming past in most of the verbs, both languages have suffixes which are still easy to be separated,(3) the similarities are: first, in the morphological typology, both languages have same morphological typology, it is agglutinating language; second, in the use of suffixes, both languages use suffixes in forming the past; and the differences are: first, in the past formation, English uses special rule in forming the past, while in Arabic, the basic verbs are in the form of past (fi’il madhi); second, in the function of suffixes, English uses suffixes to form the past while Arabic uses suffixes to show the subject and object. Finally, the researcher suggests to the next researchers who are interested in this topic to conduct comparative study in different areas and use other theories for analyzing the data.