A comparative study of ‘volition’ in English and its counterparts in Arabic

This study is concerned with the meanings of volition in Modern Standard English(MSE) and their counterparts in Modern Standard Arabic(MSA). Its aim is to identify, discuss and compare the meanings of volition constructions in the two languages. It is motivated by the fact that the area of volition is an extremely intractable area of English and Arabic grammars. Hence, it is a good candidate for an investigation. The method followed here is a contrastive analysis in which two languages are compared to find out their aspects of similarity and differences as well. In relation to the results, English is similar to Arabic in the names comprising ‘volition’, i.e., (willingness = الارادة , wish= , الرغبة intention= النِّيّة , and insistence = الاصرار ). As for the differences, only English has implicit meaning of volitional verb (wish) by using (hope, would rather, would prefer, and let). The auxiliaries (will and shall) which express wishes in English cannot do so in Arabic.