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French grammar is the set of rules by which the French language ... a mood (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, or conditional) a tense (past ... avoir ("to have ...
There are two auxiliary verbs in French: avoir (to have) and être (to be), used to conjugate compound tenses according to these rules: Transitive verbs (direct or indirect) in the active voice are conjugated with the verb avoir. Intransitive verbs are conjugated with either avoir or être (see French verbs#Temporal auxiliary verbs).
Aside from être and avoir (considered categories unto themselves), French verbs are traditionally [1] grouped into three conjugation classes (groupes): . The first conjugation class consists of all verbs with infinitives ending in -er, except for the irregular verb aller and (by some accounts) the irregular verbs envoyer and renvoyer; [2] the verbs in this conjugation, which together ...
French verbs have a large number of simple (one-word) forms. These are composed of two distinct parts: the stem (or root, or radix), which indicates which verb it is, and the ending (inflection), which indicates the verb's tense (imperfect, present, future etc.) and mood and its subject's person (I, you, he/she etc.) and number, though many endings can correspond to multiple tense-mood-subject ...
French expresses past counterfactual conditional sentences in exactly the same way as English does: the if clause uses the had + past participle form, while the then clause uses the would have + past participle form, where the equivalent of would have is the conditional of the auxiliary (avoir or être) used in all perfect constructions for the verb in question.
Well-known examples of moods in some European languages are referred to as subjunctive, conditional, and indicative as illustrated below with examples from French, all three with the verb avoir 'to have'.
The term subjunctive conditional has been used as a replacement, though it is also acknowledged as a misnomer. Many languages do not have a subjunctive (e.g., Danish and Dutch), and many that do have it don’t use it for this sort of conditional (e.g., French, Swahili, all Indo-Aryan languages that have a subjunctive). Moreover, languages that ...
For example, English uses the verb have for that purpose, French uses avoir etc. There are often alternative ways of expressing such relationships (for example, the verbs possess and belong and others can be used in English in appropriate contexts: see also have got).