The analysis of ergative verbs in English and many other
languages has been receiving much attention in linguistic studies.
Nothing has been mentioned about the existence of ergative verbs in
Arabic and generally it is a neglected topic. The domin
ant claim is that
Arabic, as a highly inflected language, lacks ergative verbs. The aim of
this paper is to show that Arabic, like English and many other languages,
does have ergative verbs. This argument will be supported by providing
many examples and comparing Arabic ergative verbs with their English
counterparts. After careful inspection of the syntactic and semantic
behavior of certain verbs, it revels that Arabic contains ergative verbs and
there are many significant differences between these verbs and
intransitive verbs.
