Adjectives in Azerbaijani and French: A Contrastive Analysis of Formation, Agreement, and Placement

Abstract

Adjectives provide a useful basis for examining how languages express comparable properties through different grammatical resources. This article presents a qualitative contrastive analysis of adjective formation, agreement, and placement in Azerbaijani and French, drawing on illustrative examples and reference-based grammatical descriptions. It distinguishes lexical derivation from inflection and separates ordinary attributive modification from substantivized and predicative uses. The analysis shows that Azerbaijani commonly expresses adjectival meanings through suffixation and prenominal modification, whereas French combines derivational processes with gender and number agreement and lexically conditioned adjective placement. Shared semantic domains, including colour, dimension, evaluation, and disposition, therefore do not imply structural equivalence. Particular attention is given to negative adjective formation, vowel-harmonic suffix variants, French feminine alternations, and constructions traditionally grouped under compound adjectives. Several overgeneralizations are reconsidered: Azerbaijani attributive adjectives do not normally agree in number with plural nouns; French feminine formation cannot be reduced to a single spelling rule; and reduplication should be distinguished analytically from lexical compounding. The article proposes a staged instructional framework for Azerbaijani-speaking learners of French, moving from noun-phrase recognition to agreement, placement, and meaning-sensitive translation. These recommendations are theoretically motivated rather than experimentally evaluated. The study contributes a focused account of the relationship between semantic comparability and grammatical asymmetry in adjective systems.