A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF PAST TENSE VERB MORPHOLOGY IN ARABIC AND VIETNAMESE

This study conducts a comprehensive comparative analysis of past tense verb morphology between Arabic, a primary representative of the Semitic inflectional (fusional) language family, and Vietnamese, a quintessential isolating (analytic) language of the Austroasiatic family. By examining the complete paradigm of twelve grammatical persons in the past tense (Al Fil Al Maadi), the paper elucidates the complex mechanism of integrating subject information (person, number, and gender) into verbal suffixes in Arabic. This is contrasted with the Vietnamese analytic mechanism, which relies heavily on independent function words and a sophisticated system of personal pronouns and honorifics. The results indicate that while Arabic achieves high communicative efficiency and"morphological economy"through inflection,Vietnamese prioritizes "lexical transparency" and socio pragmatic flexibility. This research provides a systematic framework to assist learners and educators in effectively transitioning their cognitive approach from lexico syntactic structures to morpho-grammatical constructions.