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A few adjectives have a fifth form, viz. an additional masculine singular form for use in liaison before a noun beginning with a vowel or a "mute h", e.g. un beau jardin, un bel homme, une belle femme, de beaux enfants, de belles maisons (a beautiful garden, a handsome man, a beautiful woman, beautiful children, beautiful houses).
The French simple past form, which also conveys perfective aspect, is analogous to the German simple past in that it has been largely displaced by the compound past and relegated to narrative usage. In standard French, a verb that is used reflexively takes être ('to be') rather than avoir ('to have') as auxiliary in compound past tenses ...
The auxiliary may be a verb meaning have (as in the English I have won) or a verb meaning be (as in the French je suis arrivé(e), "I (have) arrived", literally "I am arrived"). The have -perfect developed from a construction where the verb meaning have denoted possession , and the past participle was an adjective modifying the object , as in I ...
To make words or phrases gender-inclusive, French-speakers use two methods. Orthographic solutions strive to include both the masculine and feminine endings in the word. Examples include hyphens (étudiant-e-s), middle dots (étudiant·e·s), [38] parentheses (étudiant(e)s), or capital letters (étudiantEs). The parentheses method is now often ...
Language usage, on the other hand, is what takes place when the ready-made chunks do not fulfill the speaker's immediate needs; in other words, a new sentence is about to be formed and must be analyzed for correctness. Grammar rules have been internalised by native speakers, allowing them to determine the viability of new sentences.
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 ...
In this case, the child has yet to be developed into a character that can communicate with the reader. (27) a. A child learns to speak the language of its environment. (Quirk et al., A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985), p. 316–317, 342) b.
The French partitive article is often translated as some, but often simply omitted in English. It is used to indicate an indefinite portion of something uncountable, or an indefinite number of something countable: « J'ai du café » ("I have some coffee" or simply "I have coffee"). [7] The partitive article takes the following forms: