Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
Conjugation is the variation in the endings of verbs (inflections) depending on the person (I, you, we, etc), tense (present, future, etc.) and mood (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, etc.). Most French verbs are regular and their inflections can be entirely determined by their infinitive form.
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.
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'.
one based on infinitive + conditional endings from the perfect of Latin habēre, (Tuscan type), e.g. canterebbe - he would sing (literally from 'he had to sing'); one based on infinitive + conditional endings from the imperfect of Latin habēre, (Sicilian/Provençal type), e.g. cantarìa (literally from 'he was having to sing');
In Latin, most verbs have four principal parts.For example, the verb for "to carry" is given as portō – portāre – portāvī – portātum, where portō is the first-person singular present active indicative ("I carry"), portāre is the present active infinitive ("to carry"), portāvī is the first-person singular perfect active indicative ("I carried"), and portātum is the neuter supine.