contrastive analysis of numerical system in persian and french: A cognitive and linguistic study

In the framework of contrastive linguistics and with introducing cognitive and linguistic approaches, this research tries to focus on the cases of similarities and differences in the numerical system of Persian and French languages that in its turns concerns morphological and phonological system of these languages. The findings of this study have several dimensions. We have shown that both languages use two principal operations in mathematics such as multiplication, summation or the composition of both of them in order to express the numbers in the decimal, the hundreds and the thousandth systems. However both languages use simple numerals for expressing “one to ten “ .In both languages the arrangement of smaller number in complex numerals is the same in the operation of multiplication and in the summation operation the bigger number is anterior to smaller one. It is also necessary to note that in Persian language historically, we have some phonetic and phonological changes in the numeral system of this language. There are also the cases of divergences in expressing numerals in Persian and French, because the former lacks the grammatical category of gender and the latter apply this property to a vast majority of grammatical relationships in the language. In Persian numerated words have no plural form; on the contrary in French these words have the plural one with regard to their correspondent numerals. These cases of divergences are the matter of importance in which the teachers must pay such a special attention to this point, because the Iranian students have lots of problems in confronting numerical system in French.