Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The passé composé is formed by the auxiliary verb, usually the avoir auxiliary, followed by the past participle.The construction is parallel to that of the present perfect (there is no difference in French between perfect and non-perfect forms - although there is an important difference in usage between the perfect tense and the imperfect tense).
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 ...
The tense-aspect forms of the indicative mood in French are called the present (le présent: present tense, imperfective aspect), the simple past (le passé simple: past tense, perfective aspect), the imperfect (l'imparfait: past tense, imperfective aspect), the future (le futur: future tense, unspecified aspect), and the conditional (le ...
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, [a] or reflexive [a]) Nonfinite forms (e.g., participles ...
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.
Between the stem and the inflectional endings that are common across most verbs, there may be a vowel, which in the case of the -er verbs is a silent -e-(in the simple present singular), -é or -ai (in the past participle and the je form of the simple past), and -a-(in the rest of simple past singular and in the past subjunctive).
The passé simple (French pronunciation: [pase sɛ̃pl], simple past, preterite, or past historic), also called the passé défini (IPA: [pase defini], definite past), is the literary equivalent of the passé composé in the French language, used predominantly in formal writing (including history and literature) and formal speech. As with other ...
The past tense is a grammatical tense whose function is to place an action or situation in the past. Examples of verbs in the past tense include the English verbs sang , went and washed . Most languages have a past tense, with some having several types in order to indicate how far back the action took place.