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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. It is necessary in the following ...
French usually expresses negation in two parts, with the particle ne attached to the verb, and one or more negative words (connegatives) that modify the verb or one of its arguments. Negation encircles a conjugated verb with ne after the subject and the connegative after the verb, if the verb is finite or a gerund .
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.
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 ...
With a noun followed by a prepositional phrase: mother-in-law, etc.; editor-in-chief, right of way, president pro tempore (where pro tempore is a Latin prepositional phrase), fish filet deluxe (where de luxe is a French prepositional phrase) With an infinitive verb or a verb phrase: father-to-be, bride-to-be, etc.; Johnny-come-lately
Of the relative pronoun pair "who" and "whom", the subjective case form ("who") is used if it is the subject of the relative clause ("She is the police officer who saw me"); and, in formal usage, the objective case form ("whom") if it is the object of the verb or preposition in the relative clause ("She is the police officer whom I saw", "She ...
In written French, elision (both phonetic and orthographic) is obligatory for the following words: the definite articles le and la. le garçon ("the boy"), la fille ("the girl") le + arbre → l'arbre ("the tree"), la + église → l'église ("the church") the subject pronouns je and ce (when they occur before the verb) Je dors. ("I sleep") Ce ...