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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 ...
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 ...
In -é.er verbs, the é becomes an è before silent endings, and optionally in the future and conditional tenses. In -e.er verbs other than most -eler and -eter verbs, the e becomes an è before endings that start with a silent e (including the future and conditional endings). For example: peler (to peel) -> je p-èle (present) / je p-èlerai ...
This subject-verb inversion is similar to question formation in English, though in English the inversion may only occur with auxiliary verbs, while in French it may occur with all verbs. If the subject is anything other than an unstressed pronoun, an unstressed subject pronoun that agrees with the subject is added to the right of the verb.
In French, the infinitives are -er, -oir, -re, -ir, but verbs with -oir and -re are in the third group, also known as irregular verbs. Latin deponent verbs like sequor and nascor (infinitive sequī , nascī ) changed to active counterparts *séquo and *násco (infinitive *séquere , *nascere ), as in Portuguese seguir , Spanish seguir , and ...
The written linking consonant -t-is necessary for 3rd person singular verbs whose orthographic form ends in a letter other than -t or -d. This situation arises in the following cases: ending in -e: present tense indicative of all regular -er verbs, and some -ir verbs, such as ouvrir (ouvre "opens")
Verbs which in any way deviate from these rules (there are around 200 such verbs in the language) are classed as irregular. A language may have more than one regular conjugation pattern. French verbs, for example, follow different patterns depending on whether their infinitive ends in -er, -ir or -re (complicated slightly by certain rules of ...
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).