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The infinitive has a present tense, with a perfect: "faire" means "to do", while "avoir fait" means "to have done". There is a present participle, with a perfect construction: "faisant" means "doing", while "ayant fait" means "having done". As noted above, this participle is not used in forming a continuous aspect.
It is the simple tenses that are subject to conjugation rules, since in the others it is the auxiliary verb that is conjugated as a simple verb. The finite forms are: Indicative Present (présent) which is simple; Present perfect (passé composé): literally "compound past", formed with an auxiliary verb in the present; Imperfect (imparfait ...
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 auxiliary verb (abbreviated aux) is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it occurs, so as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany an infinitive verb or a participle, which respectively provide the main semantic content of the clause. [1]
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 word perfect in this sense means "completed" (from Latin perfectum, which is the perfect passive participle of the verb perficere "to complete"). In traditional Latin and Ancient Greek grammar, the perfect tense is a particular, conjugated-verb form.
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In Ancient Greek, the perfect tense (Ancient Greek: χρόνος παρακείμενος, romanized: khrónos parakeímenos) [9] is a set of forms that express both present tense and perfect aspect (finite forms), or simply perfect aspect (non-finite forms). However, not all languages conflate tense, aspect and mood.