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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.
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 ...
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 subject-verb inversion is similar to question formation in English, though in English the inversion may only occur with auxiliary verbs, while in French it may occur with all verbs. If the subject is anything other than an unstressed pronoun, an unstressed subject pronoun that agrees with the subject is added to the right of the verb.
In Old French, the verb ester < stāre maintained the Proto-Romance meaning of "to stand, stay, stop". In modern French, this verb has almost totally disappeared (see below for the one exception), although the derivative verb of rester ("to remain") exists, and some parts of the conjugation of ester have become incorporated into être "to be ...
In languages where the verb is inflected, it often agrees with its primary argument (the subject) in person, number or gender. With the exception of the verb to be, English shows distinctive agreements only in the third person singular, present tense form of verbs, which are marked by adding "-s" ( walks) or "-es" (fishes).
In French, as in English, reflexive pronouns are used in place of direct- and indirect-object pronouns that refer to the same entity or entities as the 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.
The written linking consonant -t-is necessary for 3rd person singular verbs whose orthographic form ends in a letter other than -t or -d. This situation arises in the following cases: ending in -e: present tense indicative of all regular -er verbs, and some -ir verbs, such as ouvrir (ouvre "opens")