Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
The passé composé is formed by the auxiliary verb, usually the avoir auxiliary, followed by the past participle.The construction is parallel to that of the present perfect (there is no difference in French between perfect and non-perfect forms - although there is an important difference in usage between the perfect tense and the imperfect tense).
The passé simple (French pronunciation: [pase sɛ̃pl], simple past, preterite, or past historic), also called the passé défini (IPA: [pase defini], definite past), is the literary equivalent of the passé composé in the French language, used predominantly in formal writing (including history and literature) and formal speech.
Further, where older or more literary French would have used the perfect form of the simple past tense (le passé antérieur) for the past-of-the-past, modern non-literary French uses the pluperfect (le plus-que-parfait; the perfect of the imperfect), or sometimes a new form called the surcomposé (literally, "over-compound"), which re-applies ...
The simple (one-word) forms are commonly referred to as the present, the simple past or preterite [b] (past tense, perfective aspect), the imperfect [b] (past tense, imperfective aspect), the future, the conditional, [c] the present subjunctive, and the imperfect subjunctive. However, the simple past is rarely used in informal French, and the ...
Pinker found that some adults and children will form the past-tense form splung from the novel verb spling in line with the pattern seen in fling/flung and cling/clung. However, he shows research showing these sorts of generalizations to be exceedingly rare in comparison to the over-application of the regular past-tense rule to these verbs. [3]
Particular tense forms need not always carry their basic time-referential meaning in every case. For instance, the historical present is a use of the present tense to refer to past events. The phenomenon of fake tense is common crosslinguistically as a means of marking counterfactuality in conditionals and wishes. [8] [9]
French verbs are conventionally divided into three groups. Various official and respectable French language sites explain this. The first two are the highly regular -er and -ir conjugations (conjugaisons) so defined to admit of almost no exceptions. The third group is simply all the remaining verbs and is as a result rich in patterns and ...