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I. The Structure of the French Sentence The sentence is made up of verb groups and noun groups. At the head of the sentence is the Subject, then the Verb, including Complements (or Objects) to the verb. which can include noun groups.
French has only one present tense, while English has three. Most often the translation of the simple present is the present perfect in English.
The verb and its complements are the verb group. Within this verb group, there can be only one conjugated verb, which means it has an ending to match the Subject. If there is another verb in the sentence, it is an infinitive, a verb without tense or conjugation.
The Subject is a noun group or a pronoun. Subject pronouns make conversation more efficient, but they are introduced only after the 'referent', that is, what they replace, has been talked about.
The first 'il' refers to the hotel. To avoid confusion over what the second 'il' refers to, Monique repeats the noun for hôtel because the second 'il' refers to Yves. Notice that 'je' is not capitalized within the sentence. When it begins the sentence, which seems often in the textbooks, it is capitalized.
II. Verb groups Verb groups take second position in the sentence. The engine which drives the sentence is the conjugated verb. A French verb cannot exist without a subject, even when that is a pronoun. *Trouve l'hôtel. Following the verb are its complements, other groups of words which fill out the meaning. Complements can be adverbial, meaning they modify the verb, or noun groups, which are the objects of a verb, or another verb group.
Transitive and intransitive verbs. Verbs are called transitive when they have the capacity for objects. Verbs are called instransitive when they don't have this capacity. Some transitive verbs:
How to recognize transitive verbs: there is no other grammatical particle between the verb and its object (shown here underlined) Elle déteste les épinards. Elle mange de la pizza. Elle prend un coca. Elle aime étudier le français. Aller is an intransitive verb. Its only complement can be adverbial (by prepositional phrase, with 'à').
There are some verbs which are transitive in French, but not in English.
Intransitive verbs are generally marked by the presence of the preposition 'à'.
III. The Noun Group The noun group is a subset of the verb group because both the subject and the object of the verb can be a noun group. Noun groups can be objects of a preposition. Objects of the verb can be either direct or indirect. These rules apply both to French and to English, as well as Spanish.
c. Adjectives Adjective modifiers must reflect the number and gender (singular, plural and masuline, feminine, respectively) of the noun they refer to.
In Romance languages like French and Spanish the normal position of the adjective is after the noun, and not before.
b. Determiners. Most nouns in French must be accompanied by an article, a possessive adjective, or a demonstrative adjective. These are all determiners. In French, Spanish and English, these determiners preceed the noun.
c. Pronouns When the objects of a noun group become prounouns, all pronouns relocate to the front of the verb group. This is different from English.
IV. Prepositions
Prepositions link noun groups to the verb group, such as 'à', 'de', 'dans', 'en', 'derrière', 'devant' . Use 'dans' for 'in'. The preposition 'en' is used only in certain cases, mostly idiomatic: en classe, en France, en voiture. To connect infinitives, which are not immediate future, but express 'to' for purpose, use 'pour'.
V. Negation and Adverbs French has two particles for negation, 'ne . . . pas' and 'ne . . . jamais', for example. Both are contained in the verb group, with 'ne' at the head of the verb group, and its constituents following the conjugated verb.
The phenomenon of 'do support' in English negation makes translation difficult. For example, to negate 'we eat' we have to say 'we don't eat' where the French say 'we no eat not'. Position of Adverbs. In contrast to English, French has no place in its syntax for adverbs between subject and verb. Notice how the English sentence is grammatical, but the French sentence is not.
French prefers adverbs like 'souvent', 'bien', and other one- and two-syllable adverbs to find their place behind the conjugated verb.
Quantity expressions. Expressions such as 'beaucoup' and 'pas' use 'de' between them and the quantity they are modifying, and 'de' or 'd'' never reflects the number or gender of the quantity. J'ai beaucoup de vêtements. Il n'y a pas assez de nouveaux bâtiments sur le campus. |