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In grammar, a reflexive verb is, loosely, a verb whose direct object is the same as its subject, ... French Pierre se lave. (Verb: se laver) Pierre lave le chat. Spanish
In French, all compound tense-aspect forms are formed with an auxiliary verb (either être "to be" or avoir "to have"). Most verbs use avoir as their auxiliary verb. The exceptions are all reflexive verbs and a number of verbs of motion or change of state, including some of the most frequently used intransitive verbs of the language: aller ...
For most main verbs the auxiliary is (the appropriate form of) avoir ("to have"), but for reflexive verbs and certain intransitive verbs the auxiliary is a form of être ("to be"). The participle agrees with the subject when the auxiliary is être, and with a preceding direct object (if any) when the auxiliary is avoir.
A verb with a reflexive pronoun is called a reflexive verb, and has many grammatical particularities aside from the choice of pronoun; see French verbs. There are four kinds of reflexive verbs: Verbs that are inherently reflexive. For example, the verb se souvenir (' to remember ') has no non-reflexive counterpart; the verb souvenir has no ...
Reflexive verbs (or "pronominal verbs") are conjugated with être. être is used to form the passive voice . Être is itself conjugated according to the tense and mood, and this may require the use of avoir as an additional auxiliary verb, e.g. Il a été mangé (It was eaten).
In addition to the above verbs, all reflexive/pronominal verbs use être as their auxiliary verb. A reflexive/pronominal verb is one that relates back to the speaker, either as an object e.g. Je me suis trompé 'I'm mistaken, I made a mistake' (= *j'ai trompé moi-même, literally 'I fooled myself'), or as a dative form e.g. Je me suis donné ...
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 ...
This means verbs agree with a third person subject (despite having a second person referent in reality) but unlike a true reflexive object pronoun (which requires a definite verb ending), verbs using formal/polite pronouns conjugate for definite or indefinite objects as that verb's actual object requires.
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