الفهرس 
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
The aim of this research is to conduct a contrastive study about verb and noun number in
Cairene Colloquial Arabic and Spoken British English in both form and meaning in order to
prove that a thorough understanding of a given language requires a complete
understanding of its form and function. That is to say, we need to understand not only
the formal structures of utterances, i.e. their linguistic form, but also the relation of
these utterances to the situations in which they are
used, i.e. their meaning. This is due to the fact that:
The emphasis is now on the description of language activity as part of the whole complex of events
which together with the participants and relevant objects make up actual situations.
(Ezzat 20-1)
So the tendency now is to study language in all its aspects, not to concentrate on one aspect and
to neglect the others as earlier linguists have done. For instance, Traditional grammarians have
concentrated on meaning in differentiating between the different parts of speech but they neglect
the form of such parts, although it is through the form of words and sentences that we communicate
the meanings we like to convey. Structuralists, on the other hand, have concentrated on form and
neglected the aspect of meaning as they have
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depended on the form of words i.e. their inflections and on word order to differentiate between the
different parts of speech. Halliday, however, preferred to study language in terms of its form and
function to reach the theoretical basis for
generalization about the us s
of language. The primary
function of language in Halliday’s approach is communication as he considers language an
instrument of social interaction.
Within this functional domain of language I attempted in my thesis to study both the form and
function of verb and noun number in Spoken British English and Cairene Colloqulal Arabic with a
view to clarifying the differences and similarities between both dialects in this respect.