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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 ...
Auxiliary verbs are combined with past participles of main verbs to produce compound tenses, including the compound past (passé composé). 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").
lit. "jumped", from the past participle of the verb sauter (to jump), which can be used as an adjective or a noun; quickly fried in a small amount of oil, stir-fried. ex: sauté of veau. savant lit. "knowing": a wise or learned person; in English, one exceptionally gifted in a narrow skill. savoir-faire
This article lists common abbreviations for grammatical terms that are used in linguistic interlinear glossing of oral languages [nb 1] in English. The list provides conventional glosses as established by standard inventories of glossing abbreviations such as the Leipzig Glossing rules , [ 2 ] the most widely known standard.
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).
Many other irregular verbs are easily recognized because the passé simple often resembles the past participle. For example, il courut (he ran) is from courir, for which the past participle is couru. Some, however, are totally irregular. Naitre (to be born) has a past participle né and yet the passé simple is (for example) je naquis (I was born).