TITLE:
The Object Complement in Arabic and Its Equivalent in French: A Contrastive Study
AUTHORS:
Ahmat Abdelkerim Mouhadjir, Ousman Mahamat Adam, Ahmat Ibrahim Harane, Abdelkerim Ahmat Abdelkerim
KEYWORDS:
Object Complement, Arabic Grammar, French Grammar, Transitivity, Contrastive Linguistics, Syntactic Structure
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics,
Vol.16 No.3,
June
24,
2026
ABSTRACT: This study examines the object complement in Arabic and compares it with its equivalent structures in French from a contrastive grammatical perspective. The research focuses on the definition, types, syntactic behavior, and grammatical functions of object complements in both languages. A descriptive-comparative approach is adopted, based on classical and modern Arabic grammatical sources alongside contemporary French grammatical references. Illustrative examples are used to explain the various linguistic phenomena discussed in the study. The findings reveal that Arabic relies extensively on inflectional markers and demonstrates significant flexibility in sentence structure, particularly regarding word order variation. In contrast, French depends primarily on fixed syntactic order, prepositions, and clitic pronouns to express grammatical relations. The study further highlights important differences between the two languages in terms of transitivity, object placement, and syntactic functions. It concludes that contrastive analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of the grammatical systems of Arabic and French and provides practical applications in language teaching, translation studies, and learner error analysis.