Arabic and French Past Tense Forms : Contrastive Study on Selected Models

This research aims to contrast the past tense forms in the Arabic language to the past tenses of the indicative mood in the French language based on their temporal meanings and uses because it is quite impossible to contrast them according to the morphological side, which seems to be very different in both languages. The reason for focusing on only the past tenses is that it has been recognized as a complex issue. this study also aims to help French language learners, translation learners and even translators to master the use of the past tenses in French and their different temporal meanings and uses by simply referring to their counterparts in their first language without the need of going through the details of the linguistic theories, analysis, and interpretations of the meanings and uses of the past tenses in French. To achieve this, we applied Catford's contrastive approach to a number of selected models from the Qur'an, ancient and modern books on poetry, novels, history, and translation books in both languages. We ended up defining the equivalents of all past tense forms in Arabic in the past tenses of the indicative mood in French.