Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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.
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).
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 ...
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 ...
A verb that does not follow all of the standard conjugation patterns of the language is said to be an irregular verb. The system of all conjugated variants of a particular verb or class of verbs is called a verb paradigm; this may be presented in the form of a conjugation table.
"Inherent" or "pronominal" (inherently or essentially) reflexive verbs lack the corresponding non-reflexive from which they can be synchronically derived. [8] In other words, the reflexive pronoun "is an inherent part of an unergative reflexive or reciprocal verb with no meaning of its own, and an obligatory part of the verb's lexical entry": [10]
Because the accusative and dative cases are different, the speaker must know whether the verb is reflexive accusative or reflexive dative. There are very few reflexive dative verbs, which must be memorised to ensure that the correct grammar is used. The most notable one is (sich) weh tun (to hurt oneself): Ich tue mir weh. (I hurt myself.)