Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In the oldest Indo-European languages, the distinction active/middle was the most important, whereas the development in later languages has generally been to replace the old distinction with (or to reinterpret it as) an active/passive distinction (e.g. modern English: to tease / to be teased). [1]
Verbs in French are conjugated to reflect the following information: a mood (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, or conditional) a tense (past, present, or future, though not all tenses can be combined with all moods) an aspect (perfective or imperfective) a voice (active, passive, [a] or reflexive [a]) Nonfinite forms (e.g., participles ...
The following pair of examples illustrates the contrast between active and passive voice in English. In sentence (1), the verb form ate is in the active voice, but in sentence (2), the verb form was eaten is in the passive voice. Independent of voice, the cat is the Agent (the doer) of the action of eating in both sentences.
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 ...
Active voice is a grammatical voice prevalent in many of the world's languages. It is the default voice for clauses that feature a transitive verb in nominative–accusative languages, including English and most Indo-European languages. In these languages, a verb is typically in the active voice when the subject of the verb is the doer of the ...
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 ...
Most French verbs are regular and their inflections can be entirely determined by their infinitive form. If not regular, a verb may incur changes its stem, changes in the endings or spelling adjustments for the sake of keeping correct pronunciation. French verbs are conventionally divided into three groups.
Athematic verbs, and perfect actives and aorist passives, add the suffix -ναι instead, e.g., διδό-ναι. In the middle and passive, the present middle infinitive ending is -σθαι, e.g., δίδο-σθαι and most tenses of thematic verbs add an additional -ε-between the ending and the stem, e.g., παιδεύ-ε-σθαι.