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The prepositions à (' to, at ') and de (' of, from ') form contracted forms with the masculine and plural articles le and les: au, du, aux, and des, respectively.. Like the, the French definite article is used with a noun referring to a specific item when both the speaker and the audience know what the item is.
Unlike in English, in French neither an indirect object nor a circumstantial can become the subject of the passive voice: He was given a book has no direct equivalent in French. The most common word order in French is subject-verb-object (SVO). J’adore le chocolat (I love chocolate).
The English meaning of the word exists only when in the plural form: [faire] ses débuts [sur scène] (to make one's débuts on the stage). The English meaning and usage also extends to sports to denote a player who is making their first appearance for a team or at an event.
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.
Historically, inflected prepositions can develop from the contraction of a preposition with a personal pronoun; however, they are commonly reanalysed as inflected words by native speakers and by traditional grammar. Language change over time can obscure the similarity between the conjugated preposition and the preposition-pronoun combination.
[22]: 158 The list of English prepositions is categorized this way. Though the prototypical preposition is a single word that precedes a noun phrase complement and expresses spatial relations, the category of preposition includes more than this limited notion (see English prepositions § History of the concept in English). Prepositions can be ...
Other notable syntactic changes in Quebec French include the following: In colloquial speech, the verb être is often omitted between je and un(e), with a t inserted: J't'un gars patient. A t is also often inserted after the second person singular: T'es-t-un gars patient. Use of non-standard verbal periphrasis: J'étais pour te le dire. (J ...
The prepositions a ("to") and de ("of") fuse with a following le into al and del respectively. The definite article is, on the whole, used as in English, with the exception that it should not be omitted with titles preceding proper names nor with abstract nouns representing an entire class, species, etc.