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In Canada, the passé simple continues to be used, at least more than in France. In modern spoken French, the passé simple is used occasionally as a joke to make the sentence sound either more pretentious or refined, especially after the first or second person plural, which are rarely if ever used in contemporary French, even in writing.
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).
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, for example, has a compound past (passé composé) for expressing completed events, and imperfect for continuous or repetitive events. Some languages that grammaticalise for past tense do so by inflecting the verb, while others do so periphrastically using auxiliary verbs , also known as "verbal operators" (and some do both, as in the ...
The verb forms of French are the finite forms which are combinations of grammatical moods in various tenses and the non-finite forms. The moods are: indicative (indicatif), subjunctive (subjonctif), conditional (conditionnel) and imperative (impératif). There are simple (one-word) tenses and those constructed with an auxiliary verb.
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).
French is an example of a language where, as in German, the simple morphological perfective past (passé simple) has mostly given way to a compound form (passé composé). Irish, a Celtic language, has past, present and future tenses (see Irish conjugation). The past contrasts perfective and imperfective aspect, and some verbs retain such a ...