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a T-V distinction in the second person singular (familiar tu vs. polite vous) the placement of object pronouns before the verb: « Agnès les voit. » ("Agnès sees them.") the existence of distinct pronouns for indirect objects and for certain prepositional objects; the use of a distinct disjunctive form, e.g. for emphasis (moi, toi, etc.).
For example, in the sentence « J'ai parlé à Jean » ("I spoke to Jean"), Jean is the indirect object in the French sentence. Indirect-object pronouns (or dative pronouns) generally only replace indirect objects with the preposition à. When an indirect object pronoun is used, it replaces the entire prepositional phrase; for example, « Je ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
The indirect object of the verb may be placed between the verb and the direct object of the verb: "he gave me a book" or "he wrote me a poem." The indirect object may also be expressed using a prepositional phrase using "to": "he gave a book to me".
There are two auxiliary verbs in French: avoir (to have) and être (to be), used to conjugate compound tenses according to these rules: . Transitive verbs (direct or indirect) in the active voice are conjugated with the verb avoir.