The Adjective Category in Azerbaijani and French: A Contrastive Analysis of Structural, Semantic, and Functional Properties

Abstract

This article presents a systematic comparative analysis of the adjective category in Azerbaijani and French across three interconnected analytical dimensions: structural formation and morphological typology, syntactic position and agreement behavior, and lexical-semantic classification. The two languages represent radically different morphological typologies — Azerbaijani as an agglutinative Turkic language and French as an inflectional Romance language — whose divergence produces fundamental differences in adjectival behavior that constitute a major source of learning difficulty for Azerbaijani learners of French. The analysis identifies six principal areas of contrast: the complete absence of grammatical gender in Azerbaijani adjectives versus the obligatory masculine-feminine agreement system of French; the invariant form of Azerbaijani adjectives versus the number agreement morphology of French; the strictly prenominal position of Azerbaijani adjectives versus the variable pre- and postnominal position of French adjectives; the analytic comparison system of Azerbaijani versus the partly suppletive comparison system of French; and the different semantic classification systems operative in the two languages. The article further examines the implications of these contrasts for the teaching and learning of French as a foreign language in Azerbaijani educational contexts, proposing that contrastive awareness instruction — explicit pedagogical engagement with the structural divergences identified in the analysis — constitutes the most theoretically principled and practically effective approach to addressing the characteristic errors that Azerbaijani learners produce in French adjectival grammar.