French grammar

Verbs in French are conjugated to reflect the following information:

• a mood (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, or conditional)
• a tense (past, present, or future, though not all tenses can be combined with all moods)
• an aspect (perfective or imperfective)
• a voice (active, passive,[lower-alpha 1] or reflexive[lower-alpha 1])
• Nonfinite forms (e.g., participles, gerunds, infinitives)

Some of these features are combined into seven tense–aspect–mood combinations. The simple (one-word) forms are commonly referred to as the present, the simple past or preterite[lower-alpha 2] (past tense, perfective aspect), the imperfect[lower-alpha 2] (past tense, imperfective aspect), the future, the conditional,[lower-alpha 3] the present subjunctive, and the imperfect subjunctive. However, the simple past is rarely used in informal French, and the imperfect subjunctive is rarely used in modern French.

Verbs in the finite moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, and conditional) are also conjugated to agree with their subjects in person (first, second, or third) and number (singular or plural). As in English, the subject must be included (except in the imperative mood); in other words, unlike other Romance languages, French is neither a null-subject nor a pro-drop language.

Auxiliary verbs are combined with past participles of main verbs to produce compound tenses, including the compound past (passé composé). For most main verbs the auxiliary is (the appropriate form of) avoir ("to have"), but for reflexive verbs and certain intransitive verbs the auxiliary is a form of être ("to be"). The participle agrees with the subject when the auxiliary is être, and with a preceding direct object (if any) when the auxiliary is avoir. Forms of être are also used with the past participles of transitive verbs to form the passive voice.

The imperative mood, which only has first-person plural and second-person singular and plural forms, usually has forms similar or identical to the corresponding ones in the present indicative.

Articles and determiners agree in gender and number with the noun they determine; unlike with nouns, this inflection is made in speech as well as in writing.

French has three articles: definite, indefinite, and partitive. The difference between the definite and indefinite articles is similar to that in English (definite: the; indefinite: a, an), except that the indefinite article has a plural form (similar to some, though English normally doesn't use an article before indefinite plural nouns). The partitive article is similar to the indefinite article but used for uncountable singular nouns.

An adjective must agree in gender and number with the noun it modifies. French adjectives therefore have four forms: masculine singular, feminine singular, masculine plural, and feminine plural. A few adjectives have a fifth form, viz. an additional masculine singular form for use in liaison before a noun beginning with a vowel or a "mute h", e.g. un beau jardin, un bel homme, une belle femme, de beaux enfants, de belles maisons (a beautiful garden, a handsome man, a beautiful woman, beautiful children, beautiful houses). This fifth form, which is older, is sometimes used elsewhere in set phrases, e.g. Philippe le Bel (Philip the Fair or the Handsome of France, 1268–1314) vs. Philippe le Beau (Philip the Handsome or the Fair of Castile, 1478–1506).

The masculine singular, an adjective's basic form, is listed in dictionaries. The feminine singular is normally formed by adding -e to the basic form. This -e is mute, which makes many masculine and feminine forms homophonous (cf. civil > civile 'civil', both pronounced /sivil/). However, the ending causes "mute" final sounds to be pronounced, whereby masculine-feminine pairs become distinguishable in pronunciation if the masculine form ends in a mute consonant, which is the case with a great deal of adjectives (cf. lourd [luʁ] > lourde [luʁd] 'heavy'). Under certain circumstances, other minor changes occur in the formation of feminine forms, such as the placement of an accent, the doubling of a consonant, or its replacement with another, changes that often reflect the pronunciation of such endings (cf. bon [bɔ̃] > bonne [bɔn] 'good'; heureux [øʁø] > heureuse 'happy'). Irregular feminine forms include beau > belle 'beautiful', blanc > blanche 'white', and a limited number of others. If an adjective's basic form ends in -e, it is left unchanged in the feminine (cf. riche > riche 'rich').

The plural is normally formed by adding -s to the singular (masculine and feminine). This -s is usually mute, but pronounced [z] in liaison with a following noun that begins with a vowel. Unlike liaison after plural nouns, liaison after plural adjectives is common and even obligatory in standard usage. If the basic form ends in -s, -x, or -z, an adjective is left unchanged in the masculine plural (cf. doux > doux 'soft, gentle'). A few adjectives take the (also mute) ending -x in the masculine plural (cf. nouveau > nouveaux 'new'). Plural forms that are distinguishable from the singular outside of liaison environments occur only with adjectives ending in -al. These normally have -aux in the masculine plural (cf. central [sɑ̃tʁal] > centraux [sɑ̃tʁo] 'central'). By contrast, the feminine plural is formed according to the general rule: centrale > centrales.

Due to the aforementioned rules, French adjectives might have four distinguished written forms which are all pronounced the same. This is the case if an adjective's masculine and feminine forms are homophonous and if there is no liaison between the adjective and a following noun.

On the other hand, if the masculine and feminine forms have different pronunciations and liaison does occur, all four forms can be distinguishable in pronunciation. Adjective declension is therefore important in spoken French, though to a lesser extent than in writing. (All forms distinguished in pronunciation are also distinguished in writing, but not vice versa.)

Due to the peculiar orthography of French, which denotes mute final consonants, most feminine forms seem regular in terms of their spelling because they are formed by adding -e to the masculine form, e.g., grand > grande, lent > lente, persan > persane. However, if we put this etymologic orthography aside and consider only current pronunciation, the formation of French female forms becomes quite irregular with several possible "endings": [ɡʁɑ̃] > [ɡʁɑ̃d], [lɑ̃] > [lɑ̃t], [pɛʁsɑ̃] > [pɛʁsan].

Most adjectives, when used attributively, appear after their nouns: le vin rouge ("the red wine"). A number of adjectives (often having to do with beauty, age, goodness, or size, a tendency summarized by the acronym "BAGS"), come before their nouns: une belle femme ("a beautiful woman"). With a few adjectives of the latter type, there are two masculine singular forms: one used before consonants (the basic form), and one used before vowels. For example, the adjective beau ("beautiful") changes form from un beau garçon ("a handsome boy") to un bel homme ("a handsome man"). Some adjectives change position depending on their meaning, sometimes preceding their nouns and sometimes following them. For example, ancien means "former" when it precedes its noun, but "ancient" when it follows it. To give another example, un homme grand means "a tall man", whereas un grand homme means "a great man".

Many compound words contain an adjective, such as une belle-mère "a mother-in-law", which is distinct from une belle mère "a beautiful mother". Some of them use an archaic form of the feminine adjective that lacks the final -e. These used to be written with an apostrophe, but a hyphen is now (at least since 1960) considered more correct: une grand-route (formerly, une grand'route) "a main country road", which is distinct from une grande route "a long way", and une grand-mère (formerly, une grand'mère) "a grandmother", which is distinct from une grande mère "a tall mother".

As in English, adverbs in French are used to modify adjectives, other adverbs, verbs, or clauses. Most adverbs are derived from an adjective by adding the suffix -ment, usually to its feminine form (-ment is analogous to the English suffix -ly): e.g. anciennement "anciently", "of old", "in olden times"; grandement "greatly"; lentement "slowly"; though there are some systematic deviations (e.g. patient → patiemment "patiently", malaisé → malaisément "uneasily"), some adverbs are derived irregularly (bon "good" → bien "well") and others do not derive from adjectives at all.

Adverbs themselves are generally invariable. An exception to this is the adverb tout "wholly, very" which agrees in gender and number with the adjective it modifies when it is in the feminine and begins with a consonant (e.g. tout petit "very small, m.s.", tous petits "very small, m.pl." but toute petite "very small, f.s.", toutes petites "very small, f.pl." — when beginning with a vowel however: tout entier, tout entiers, tout entière, tout entières "completely, as a whole" (with liaison)).

French prepositions link two related parts of a sentence. In word order, they are placed in front of a noun in order to specify the relationship between the noun and the verb, adjective, or other noun that precedes it. Some common French prepositions are: à (to, at, in), à côté de (next to, beside), après (after), au sujet de (about, on the subject of), avant (before), avec (with), chez (at the home/office of, among), contre (against), dans (in), d'après (according to), de (from, of, about), depuis (since, for), derrière (in back of, behind), devant (in front of), durant (during, while), en (in, on, to), en dehors de (outside of), en face de (facing, across from), entre (between), envers (toward), environ (approximately), hors de (outside of), jusque (until, up to, even), loin de (far from), malgré (despite), par (by, through), parmi (among), pendant (during), pour (for), près de (near), quant à (as for, regarding), sans (without), selon (according to), sous (under), suivant (according to), sur (on), vers (toward).

In French, pronouns can be inflected to indicate their role in a clause (subject, direct object, etc.), as well as the person, gender, and number of their referent. Not all of these inflections may be present at once; for example, the relative pronoun que (that, which, whom) may have any referent, while the possessive pronoun le mien (mine) may have any role in a clause.

As noted above, French (like English) is a non-pro-drop ("pronoun-dropping") language; therefore, pronouns feature prominently in the language. Impersonal verbs (e.g., pleuvoir – to rain) use the impersonal pronoun il (analogous to English it).

French object pronouns are all clitics. Some appear so consistently – especially in everyday speech — that some have commented that French could almost be considered to demonstrate polypersonal agreement.[3]

French usually expresses negation in two parts, with the particle ne attached to the verb, and one or more negative words (connegatives) that modify the verb or one of its arguments. Negation encircles a conjugated verb with ne after the subject and the connegative after the verb, if the verb is finite or a gerund. However, both parts of the negation come before the targeted verb when it is in its infinitive form. For example:

• Je les ai pris I took them → Je ne les ai pas pris I did not take them
• Je voudrais regarder un film et m'endormir I would like to watch a movie and fall asleep → Je voudrais regarder un film et ne pas m'endormir. I would like to watch a movie and not fall asleep

Other negative words used in combination with ne are:

• negative adverbs

ne … plus — not anymore, no longer

ne … jamais — never

ne … nulle part — nowhere

ne … guère — not much, hardly (literary)

ne … point / aucunement / nullement — not, not at all (literary)

• negative pronouns

ne … rien — nothing

ne … personne — nobody

• others

(determiner) ne … aucun — no/not any (also nul, literary)

(restrictive particle) ne … que — only

Examples:

• Je ne sais pas. — I do not know.
• Il ne fume plus. — He does not smoke anymore.
• Nous n'avons vu personne. — We did not see anybody.
• Elle n'a rien bu. — She didn't drink anything.
• Je n'ai aucune idée. — I have no idea.
• Vous ne mangez que des légumes ? — You only eat vegetables?

The negative adverbs (and rien) follow finite verbs but precede infinitives (along with ne):

• Il prétend ne pas/ne jamais/ne rien fumer. — He claims not to smoke/to never smoke/to smoke nothing.

Moreover, it is possible for rien and personne to be used as the subject of a sentence, which moves them to the beginning of the sentence (before the ne):

• Rien n'est certain. — Nothing is certain.
• Personne n'est arrivé. — Nobody came.

Several negative words (other than pas) can appear in the same sentence, but the sentence is still usually interpreted as a simple negation. When another negative word occurs with pas, a double negation interpretation usually arises, but this construction is criticised.

• Elle n'a plus jamais rien dit à personne. — She never said anything else to anybody.
• Elle n'a pas vu personne. — She did not see nobody (i.e., she saw somebody).

In French, the equivalent of the English existential clause "there is/are" is expressed with il y a (infinitive: y avoir), literally, "it there has" or "it has to it". As an impersonal verb, the verb may be conjugated to indicate tense, but always remains in the third person singular. For example

• « Il y a deux bergers et quinze moutons dans le pré. » – "There are two shepherds and fifteen sheep in the meadow."
• « Il y aura beaucoup à manger. » – "There will be a lot to eat."
• « Il y aurait deux morts et cinq blessés dans l'accident. » – "There appears to have been (lit. would have) two dead and five injured in the accident." (as in news reporting)
• « Il n'y avait personne chez les Martin. » – "There was nobody at the Martins' home."

This construction is also used to express the passage of time since an event occurred, like the English ago or it has been:

• « Je l'ai vu il y a deux jours. » – "I saw him two days ago."
• « Il y avait longtemps que je ne l'avais pas vu. » – "It had been a long time since I had seen him."
• « Le langage d'il y a cent ans est très différent de celui d'aujourd'hui. » – "The language/usage of one hundred years ago is very different from that of today."

In informal speech, il y is typically reduced to [j], as in:

• Y a [ja] deux bergers et quinze moutons dans le pré.
• Y aura [joʁa] beaucoup à manger.
• Y avait [javɛ] personne chez les Martin.
• Je l'ai vu y a deux jours.

The components of a declarative clause are typically arranged in the following order (though not all components are always present):[5]

• Adverbial(s)
• Subject
• ne (usually a marker for negation, though it has some other uses)
• First- and second-person object pronoun (me, te, nous, vous) or the third-person reflexive pronoun (se)
• Third-person direct-object pronoun (le, la, les)
• Third-person indirect-object pronoun (lui or leur)
• The pronoun y
• The pronoun en
• Finite verb (may be an auxiliary)
• Adverbial(s)
• (second marker for negation) The pronouns pas, rien, personne, aucun.e, peu, que (if not subject)
• Main verb (if the finite verb is an auxiliary)
• Adverbial(s)
• Direct object
• Indirect object
• Adverbial(s)

Note that what is called in English (and above) an indirect object is in many cases called complément circonstanciel d'attribution according to French grammar conventions (e.g., in donner quelque chose à quelqu'un “to give sth. to s.o.” or “to give s.o. sth.”). What the French call complément d'objet indirect is a complement introduced by an essentially void à or de (at least in the case of a noun) required by some particular, otherwise intransitive, verbs: e.g. Les cambrioleurs ont profité de mon absence “the robbers took advantage of my absence” — but the essentially synonymous les cambrioleurs ont mis mon absence à profit has a direct object instead. Unlike in English, in French neither an indirect object nor a circumstantial can become the subject of the passive voice: He was given a book has no direct equivalent in French.

The most common word order in French is subject-verb-object (SVO).

• J’adore le chocolat (I love chocolate).

French also allows for verb-object-subject (VOS) though the usage is relatively rare and various constraints apply. The most common instance of this word order is in more formal texts or in response to questions with a focus on the subject, as opposed to more broad questions such as, Qu’est-ce qui s’est passé? (what happened?). Below are examples of each circumstance.

• Formal or administrative text – Recevront un bulletin de vote les étudiants et le personnel académique (students as well as academic staff will receive a ballot paper).
• Response to questions with a focus on the subject – Qui a mangé les gâteaux? (who ate the cakes?)
  • Ont mangé les gâteaux Marie, Perre et Stéphanie (Marie, Pierre and Stephanie are those who ate the cakes).

Finally, in a comparatively limited number of instances French allows for object-subject-verb (OSV) word order, such as when adding emphasis

• Le chocolat j’adore (chocolate I LOVE).

In regard to word order, French is more restrictive than other Romance languages. For example, Spanish allows for all six possible word orders, compared to French’s three. Additionally, unlike other Romance languages, specifically Spanish and Italian, French does not have free inversion, which is often explained by French not being a pro-drop language (while Spanish and Italian are).[6]

Broadly speaking, there are two types of questions; yes/no questions and information questions.

Cleft sentences are sentences that consist of two clauses, one of which is a copular clause and one of which is a relative clause, also known as a cleft clause. The copular clause consists of a copula followed by the cleft constituent. Cleft sentences are found in many European languages, including French. In the sentence, c'est Stella qui lit Kant (It's Stella who reads Kant) "c'est Stella" is the copular clause, "Stella" is the cleft constituent, and "qui lit Kant" is the cleft clause.[10]

French is the only romance language to have "homophonous interrogative, exclamative, and relative constructions sharing the same Que+est+ce+que string".[12] One theory to explain this unique phenomenon is that the first "que" is a covert duplicate of the following ce+que clause (exclamative and relative clauses, respectively). Despite Modern French spelling, the ce que part of the phrase is actually a complex complementizer of headless relatives.

• Le Bon Usage, a reference by Maurice Grevisse, and later editions by André Goosse