Synthetic Verbs in English and French

Abstract

It has always been difficult for language learners to relate a particular itemfrom a given language with its appropriate equivalent counterpart in another language. And, this difficulty appears more clearly and mainly when bilinguals try to translate an expression from one language to the other.The present paper is an attempt to relate the English so-called synthetic verb and its equivalent analytic construction with their equivalent counterparts in French and vice versa.The paper consists of two parts: the first is a set of preliminaries about these two expressions in English- their definitions, formation processes and patterns; the second is a parallelinganalyticalsurveybetween these expressions in English and their equivalent counterparts in French and vice versa.Along the second part, two main Internet resources are used to support the researcher's work- the Google Translate website and a collection of poems by the French poet Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891). Choosing Rimbaud in particular is due to the fact that the researcher has previously achieved a study about him and his poetry; besides there is a website containing his poems in French and in English, the matter that shall facilitate the process of conducting this study.