Involuntary Syntactic Error of Interlingual Word Order When English Rigid Word Order Momentarily Deforms Arabic Clauses

This paper intends to explore the potential momentary influence of English rigid word order on the placement of Arabic preverbal subjects. The idea is that English as a Subject-Verb-Object language has one subject position; thus, it poses no restrictions on the distribution of determiner phrases in this position. By contrast, Standard Arabic (henceforth, Arabic) uses two different word orders (Subject-Verb/Verb-Subject-(Object), SVO/VSO). As a result, indefinite determiner phrases are not freely distributed in the subject position; that is, they can appear in the postverbal subject position -VSO but not in the preverbal subject position -SVO. Because the two languages use different syntactic word orders and different subject positions, two experimental tasks (an Arabic guided writing task and an English-to-Arabic translation written task) were administered to find out whether the English word order momentarily causes Arabic learners of English to violate their language subject distributions. Analysis of the performance of Arabic native participants in the two tasks revealed two important outcomes: a) when participants were asked to reorder scrambled words into full clauses, they significantly preferred VSO order; in contrast, b) when participants were asked to translate full English clauses into Arabic, they strikingly preferred SVO order violating syntactic parametric (distributional) restrictions on the placement of indefinite determiner phrases. In other words, they used indefinite determiner phrases in the preverbal subject position. Based on the results, the study argues that the improper use of indefinite determiner phrases in the preverbal subject position is not due to the implicit knowledge of Arabic grammar; it is due to the momentary influence of English syntactic word order involuntarily exerted by participants.


Introduction
The involuntary influence of the first language (L1) grammar on the second language (L2) grammar has been extensively investigated in the literature (Derakhshan & Karimi, 2015;Juffs, 2005;Kobayashi & Rinnert, 1992;Kosterina, 2007;Woodall, 2002, etc.). Researchers have investigated this type of influence on the basis that L1 is the potential source of influence and concluded that L1 can positively affect L2 (positive transfer) or negatively affect L2 (negative transfer). The current study digresses from this norm. In other words, it investigates the effect of L2 grammar on L1. Precisely, it tries to determine whether English rigid word order (i.e., Subject-Verb-Object, SVO) involuntarily influences Arabic variable word order (i.e., VSO or SVO) in terms of the subject placement in pre/postverbal positions. This phenomenon (L2 effect on L1) has not received much attention in the literature. Few studies (Abu-Rabia et al., 2013;Agheshteh, 2015;Balcom, 2003;Benmamoun et al., 2010;Cook, 2003;Montrul, 2010;Zinszer et al., 2015) have investigated L2 effect on L1 on the basis that L2 is the dominant language and L1 is less dominant. By contrast, this study aims to investigate the effect of English (L2) as a less dominant language on Arabic (L1) as a dominant language (i.e., in a context where English is considered a second language).
English and Arabic have different syntactic word orders. The former has one rigid word order, SVO, whereas the latter has SVO and VSO. Additionally, English has no restrictions on the distributions of indefinite determiner phrases (henceforth, DP) in the subject position whereas Arabic does. That is, English indefinite DPs are permitted  Vol. 11, No. 3;2021 argument, is more complex than SVO derivation. To test the complexity of Arabic different word order, Thompson and Werfelli (2012) investigate the processing of VSO and SVO structures in spoken Saudi Arabic. They examine the processing times associated with these constructions. As mentioned above, in section 2.1, that VSO order is derived with the subject remaining in situ, in VP, and the verb raising over the subject to T. In contrast, SVO order is derived by extracting the subject out of VP to Spec of TP and the verb raising to T. The authors use the processing time as evidence to determine which structure takes more time, concluding that VSO takes less time than SVO. Their study's findings might be used to argue against the idea that VSO is more complex than SVO as claimed by Albirini et al. It can be inferred that the dominance of SVO order shown by Egyptian heritage speakers is due to the transfer of English language rigid word order to Arabic; it may not be due to the complexity of VSO structure. Cross-linguistically, Harrington (1987) contends that Japanese as L2 learners of English tend to adopt English word order Noun-Verb-Noun (NVN) and prefer it to NNV or VNN; inanimate subjects are permitted by the learners to appear in NVN, a process that is not acceptable in Japanese registers. It seems that English word order has affected the learners' tendency toward using NVN order.

Polinsky (2009) compares English dominant heritage speakers of Russian to monolingual Russian speakers.
Participants were asked to match pictures to either active or passive constructions. Russian can be SVO, VOS or VSO. She finds that heritage speakers have problems whenever the word order differs from the English word order, SVO. It can be argued that the dominant language has a positive transfer on the weak language. By contrast, it can be claimed that heritage speakers have the necessary implicit knowledge of their heritage language, but because of the dominance of the strong language, they cannot exploit it given the negative transfer.
In summary, the effect of the dominant language, L2 in the previous studies, on L1 is transparently attested. More specifically, the distribution of the clause elements (subjects, verbs, objects) of languages that structurally differ from English is affected by the English word order.

Participants
Thirty-three native speakers of Arabic who were university undergraduate students participated in the study. They are enrolled in the second year in the Faculty of Engineering at King Saud University. English was the medium of instruction. Prior to their admission to the Faculty of Engineering, the participants had been taught English for one year in the preparatory year program.

Stimuli
The study used two tasks: an Arabic guided writing task and an English-to-Arabic translation written task. These tasks are described in the following two subsections.

Arabic Guided Writing Task
This task was administered for two important reasons. First, it aimed to explore participants' preferred Arabic word order and their tendency toward the distribution of indefinite DPs in the preverbal subject position. Second, it aimed to determine whether the results of this task, on the one hand, confirmed that participants employed indefinite DPs in the suitable syntactic position, postverbal subject position (VSO); and whether the results of the translation task, on the other hand, proved that the participants incorrectly placed the indefinite DPs in the preverbal subject position (SVO). Then, it can be strongly argued that the incorrect placement of indefinite DPs is attributed to the momentary influence of L2 subject distribution and word order and not to any other factor. Regarding the guided writing task design, the task consisted of 16 Arabic sentences. Specifically, each sentence's content words were presented in a scrambled order. The participants were asked to rearrange them in the correct order. The stimuli included in this task were as follows: a) ten target sentences and b) six distracting sentences. The target sentences consisted of transitive verbs in the past form, indefinite DPs and additional complements (object DPs or prepositional phrases). The distracting sentences consisted of similar contents except for the indefinite DPs; definite DPs were used instead. In those generated sentences, no adjectives were used. Therefore, the only grammatically correct word order that participants were expected to use was VSO order. Three different versions were generated: E1, E2 and E3; see Appendix A for a sample version.

English-to-Arabic Translation Written Task
This task aimed to explore whether the English word order momentarily causes Arabic learners of English to violate the preverbal subject distributions parametrized by their language grammar. The design of this task was basically a 'mirror image' translation of the three versions of the guided writing task stimuli. In other words, the contents of the guided writing task were translated word for word from Arabic into English. Of course, the scrambled content words were translated as full sentences. Since the aim of this task was to check L2 word order ijel.ccsenet. effect on L items. Add any Englis

Proced
The two ta that runni placement naturalistic task. One w identifying respective given a d eleven-par in the first Table 1 b timeframe to 20 minu

Analysis of the Guided Writing Task
This task was administered to probe participants' preferred word order, VSO or SVO. Results showed that participants preferred VSO to SVO; see Figure 1 and Table 2 for an overview. Participants' tendency for VSO resulted in them placing the indefinite subject DPs in the correct place, in the postverbal position. Using the scrambled words determined for each sentence, participants rewrote 229 sentences in the VSO order; this number represented 69.39% of the total number, 330 sentences. By contrast, participants incorrectly rewrote 97 (29.39%) sentences in the SVO order, placing the indefinite subject DPs in the preverbal positions. The participants ordered a very small portion of the sentences in neither VSO nor SVO. Only four sentences were encoded as non-specified, as shown in Table 2.

Analysis of the Translation Task
The translation task aimed to determine whether participants translated English sentences in VSO or SVO. Strikingly, participants translated a high number of the given sentences in SVO. They translated 277 sentences in SVO order. By contrast, they translated only 53 sentences (16.06%) in VSO order; see Table 3 for illustrations. The translated sentences in SVO order formed 83.94% of the 330 sentences included in the task. More explanations follow in the discussion section below.

Discussions
The study explored the noticeable effect of English language word order as an L2 on native speakers' native language. Participants' performance in the translation task administered in the study was assumed to be affected by L2 word order. To answer the study's research question, when translating from English to Arabic, will English learners who are native speakers of Arabic involuntarily apply English syntactic word order to Arabic structures being translated? the results showed that participants had involuntarily used the English language word order to translate the given sentences into Arabic. As can be inferred from the results, participants strikingly translated most of the given sentences in SVO. They exerted English language word order on Arabic sentences; this resulted in the wrong placement of the indefinite DPs in the preverbal subject position. The incorrect placement of indefinite DPs in the preverbal subject position might well be attributed to the English word order effect and not to the implicit knowledge of the participants' native language. This claim is supported by participants' performance in the guided writing task. That is, the administration of the guided writing task revealed that the participants grammatically reordered the scrambled words in VSO order, adhering to Arabic language grammar rules in terms of placing the indefinite DPs in the right syntactic position, the postverbal position. To sum up, it is assumed that English word order momentarily influenced participants' native language grammar.

Conclusions
The study found that participants applied English syntactic word order to Arabic translated sentences. Consequently, they produced ungrammatical structures that violated Arabic language grammar, which preserves the preverbal subject positions for definite DPs only. In other words, participants involuntarily used the indefinite DPs in the preverbal subject position. The improper placement of the indefinite DPs in the preverbal subject position is assumed to result from the English word order, which allows indefinite DPs to appear in the preverbal subject position, which, by Occam's razor, is the only subject position in English. It can be postulated that when the participants were translating English sentences, their implicit knowledge of Arabic was momentarily affected by English word order, which resulted in incorrectly translated sentences.