Deleting Subordinators in English and Arabic Subordinate Adverbial Clauses with Reference to Translation: A Contrastive Study

Abstract

    This study is a contrastive syntactic analysis whose main focus related to the deletion of subordinators in both English and Arabic subordinate adverbial clauses. The present study tackles the problem of deleting subordinators in the English surface structure of the subordinate clause and transforming the finite clause into a non- finite or verbless clause. These clauses have different sorts of syntactic structures which could pose problems to translators. This study aims at showing (1) Whether all types of the English subordinate adverbial clauses involve deletion of the subordinator, (2) Whether Arabic can exhibit corresponding surface structures where the Arabic subordinator can be deleted. This study limits itself to the subordinate adverbial clauses as they appear within the context of the complex sentence. Other types of subordinate clause, nominal and adjectival, are beyond the scope of this study. It is hoped that this study is of some theoretical and practical value to those concerned with syntactic structures and translation.

     The methodology adopted in tackling the subject under investigation is the contrastive approach.