Cross-cultural Study for Similes in English and Arabic

Contrastive linguistics is a vital and flourishing branch of linguistics. Within this field languages, are investigated, or more precisely, the level of languages are examined and compared with each other in order to find similarities and differences. The current study is a contrastive study between Arabic and English languages and examines the phenomena of similes within these two languages. The focus in the current study was on four adjectives namely: tough, sure, dry, and silent. In order to find frequencies for the previous adjectives within similes in English, BNC corpora were used where a questionnaire was distributed to some students asking about the use of certain adjectives as similes in the Arabic language. The results show that both English and Arabic use these adjectives. However, though there maybe be some similarities in how these similes are used by both languages, most of them are used in are used in different ways relying on the cultural differences.