: A Comparative Study of Ingressive Verbs in Arabic and English: Syntactic and Pragmatic Perspectives
Abstract
This study presents a contrastive analysis of ingressive verbs in Arabic and English, examining their syntactic patterns and pragmatic functions. Drawing on examples from authentic language use and a comparative-analytical approach, the study examines how these patterns signal the initiation of states or actions and exhibit typologically distinct realizations across languages. English favors phrasal and periphrastic structures (e.g., fall asleep, start writing), whereas Arabic expresses ingressive meaning by employing lexical verbs of beginning followed by the imperfect (e.g., شرع في الكلام، أخذ ينام). The study employs a comparative methodology, analyzes syntactic behavior, explores the pragmatic effects of onset marking, and identifies translation challenges. The analysis highlights the fixed syntactic behavior of Arabic ingressive verbs and the flexible structural patterns of English ingressive verbs. Yet, both languages achieve functional alignment at the pragmatic level. These results carry relevance to translation equivalence and comparative analysis.
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