Abstract

Oath or swear expression, in one of its meanings, is a formal promise to do something or a formal statement that something is true. It is also a learned form of human behaviour, a culturally conditioned response to the experience of certain conditions and it can be constructed by using certain words like words invest with power of God. The use of oath is to add emphasis to what one says.
This paper sheds the light on oath expressions in English and Arabic. This is a descriptive contrastive study. It aims to : a- appoint the oath expressions in the target data and their forms, b- describe, for the purpose of comparison, the syntactic structures of the oath or swear expressions in the two languages c- show statistically the most frequent expressions in the target works of Shakespeare and Al-Mutanabbi each aside.
This paper falls into seven sections: section one is an introduction, section two reviews oath in English, section three surveys oath in Arabic, section four concerns with the analyses of oath expressions in Shakespeare's plays, section five reveals the analyses of oath expressions in Al- Mutanabbi's poems and section six is the end of the paper with the conclusions.

Key words: Contrastive Study, English-Arabic Syntax, Swear or Oath Expressions