CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF FRENCH AND NUBIAN: NOUN PHRASE CONSTRUCTIONS

This study aims to reveal the similarities and differences between French and Nubian languages regarding the internal structure of their noun phrases and the order of the constituents in their simple and complex noun phrases. To this end, the contrastive analysis (CA) is applied which is composed of three steps as (1) description; (2) juxtaposition; (3) comparison. The contrastive analysis in this study shows that French and Nubian languages have many differences regarding the placement of a head noun, the placement of an adjective of size and quality, the placement of numerals and the case marker in a complex noun phrase and share fewer similarities such that both languages can use two adjectives successively in a complex noun phrase. The findings of this study contribute to comparative historical linguistics to establish language genealogy, to typological linguistics to create language taxonomies, to translation studies to investigate problems of equivalence in creating bilingual dictionaries.