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Abstract This is a contrastive study on reformulation markers in English and Arabic research papers. The data examined in the study consists of 50 research papers (25 Arabic and 25 English) on Humanities. The study tackles reformulation markers from two perspectives. The first is semantic, in the sense that it conducts a contrastive semantic analysis of the form, frequency, and function of reformulation markers. While the second one is of contrastive rhetoric perspective. It tests the validity of Kaplan’s 1966 hypothesis about the differences in writing style between English and Arabic. The findings of the study show that considering the form, frequency, and function of reformulation markers, authors writing in English tend to use reformulation markers to express seven semantic functions, whereas authors writing in Arabic tend to use reformulation markers to express six semantic functions. Moreover, Arabic research articles show a greater variety of markers (37 forms) than their English counterparts (33 forms). The findings also show that there is no significant difference concerning the most frequent function of reformulation used in the English and Arabic corpus: Expansion (elaboration). Moreover, the findings show that the marker أى (that is) is the most frequent marker used in Arabic, while in English, the marker rather is the most frequent marker used. The findings also show that there is no cross-linguistic difference in the polysemy of the markers. In both languages, there are markers that tend to be more polysemous since they can express more than one semantic function. Considering the validity of Kaplan’s 1966 hypothesis, the results of this study are consistent with the results of Kaplan (1966), Koch (1983), Leki (1992), and Hatim (1997) concerning the frequencies and percentages of reformulation markers; but differ concerning the results of the statistical analysis as the difference in the number of reformulation markers is insignificant. Although English and Arabic are different in the number of reformulation markers used in favor of Arabic, these differences are statistically insignificant, (p˂ 0.05). |