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What the French call complément d'objet indirect is a complement introduced by an essentially void à or de (at least in the case of a noun) required by some particular, otherwise intransitive, verbs: e.g. Les cambrioleurs ont profité de mon absence 'the robbers took advantage of my absence' — but the essentially synonymous les cambrioleurs ...
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.
The prepositions à and de contract with le and les to form au, aux, du, and des, respectively; this is still the case here. Thus, for example, auxquelles means "at/to which ones" (feminine), and duquel means "of/from which one" (masculine). For more information on the formation of questions, see French grammar.
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 ...
An example of historical elision in French that began at the phrasal level and became lexicalized is preposition de > d' in aujourd'hui "today", now felt by native speakers to be one word, but deriving from au jour de hui, literally "at the day of today" and meaning "nowadays", although hui is no longer recognized as meaningful in French. In ...
Preposition stranding or p-stranding is the syntactic construction in which a so-called stranded, hanging, or dangling preposition occurs somewhere other than immediately before its corresponding object; for example, at the end of a sentence. The term preposition stranding was coined in 1964, predated by stranded preposition in 1949.
In linguistics, an object is any of several types of arguments. [1] In subject-prominent, nominative-accusative languages such as English, a transitive verb typically distinguishes between its subject and any of its objects, which can include but are not limited to direct objects, [2] indirect objects, [3] and arguments of adpositions (prepositions or postpositions); the latter are more ...
French verbs are conjugated by isolating the stem of the verb and adding an ending. In the first and second conjugation, the stem is easily identifiable from the infinitive, and remains essentially constant throughout the paradigm. For example, the stem of parler ("speak") is parl-and the stem of finir ("finish") is fin-. In the third group ...