Adverbial Infinitive in English and its Counterpart in Arabic with Reference to Translation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21928/juhd.v3n3y2017.pp562-569Keywords:
adverbial infinitive, infinitive in English & Arabic, contrastive linguistics, translationAbstract
This paper tackles adverbial infinitive in English and its counterpart in Arabic with reference to translation. The aim of the paper is to highlight the points of similarity and diffirence between English and Arabic as far as adverbial infinitive is concerned. The paper also aims at giving suggestions for translating English adverbial infinitive into Arabic and vice versa. The procedure followed in the present paper is to directly compare between the uses of the English infinitive as adverbial and their Arabic equivalent uses to find out in what aspects they are similar and in what aspects they are different. Syntactically, the results show that infinitive in both English and Arabic can be used as adjunct; however, only in English the infinitive can be disjunct or conjunct. Semantically, the infinitive in both languages can express purpose, result, time, reason, condition, exception, and preference. However, there are differences in the details of the uses of the infinitive in each language. Yet, only English has infinitive as comparison, and only Arabic has infinitive as similarity. The study has provided suggestions for translating English adverbial infinitive into Arabic and for translating the Arabic counterpart of English adverbial infinitive into English.
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