French Grammar Lecture Notes

Introduction to French Grammar

• Rules for constructing statements, questions, and commands in French.
• Shares similarities with other Romance languages.

Inflection in French

• French is moderately inflected.
  • Nouns and Pronouns: Inflected for number (singular/plural).
  • Adjectives: Inflected for number and gender (masculine/feminine).
  • Personal Pronouns: Inflected for person, number, gender, and case.
  • Verbs: Inflected for tense, aspect, mood, person, and number of subjects.

Verb Conjugation

• French verbs are conjugated to reflect:
  • Mood: Indicative, imperative, subjunctive, conditional.
  • Tense: Past, present, future.
  • Aspect: Perfective, imperfective.
  • Voice: Active, passive, reflexive.
  • Nonfinite Forms: Participles, gerunds, infinitives.
  • Common combinations include present, simple past, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive forms.

Use of Auxiliary Verbs

• Combined with past participles to form compound tenses (e.g., passé composé).
• Avoir and Être are primary auxiliary verbs.

Noun Gender and Number

• Every noun has a grammatical gender (masculine or feminine).
• Gender alignment often corresponds to natural gender.
• Plural nouns referring to mixed-gender groups are masculine.
• Some nouns change gender based on context or retain a fixed gender.

Articles and Determiners

• Agree in gender and number with nouns.
• Types: definite, indefinite, and partitive.

Adjectives

• Must agree in gender and number with nouns.
• Some adjectives precede nouns (e.g., beauty, age, goodness, size).
• Different forms for liaison before vowels.

Pronouns

• Inflected for role, person, gender, and number.
• French is a non-pro-drop language; pronouns are essential.

Negation

• Expressed in two parts: ne + negative word(s).
• Various negative words (e.g., pas, jamais, rien, personne).
• Ne can sometimes be used alone in literary contexts.

Sentence Structure

• Typical order: Subject-Verb-Object (SVO).
• Other orders: Verb-Object-Subject (VOS), Object-Subject-Verb (OSV).

Questions

• Yes/No Questions can be formed by:
  1. Raising intonation.
  2. Adding est-ce que.
  3. Using n'est-ce pas.
  4. Inverting verb and subject.
• Information Questions formed by changing and moving question words.

Existential Clauses

• "There is/are" expressed as il y a.
• Can indicate passage of time (similar to "ago").

Important Concepts

• Adverbial Cleft Sentences: Cleft constituent has adverbial function.
• Cleft Clauses: Subject clefts and complement clefts (e.g., C’est Kant que Stella lit).

References and Further Reading

• Comprehensive resources available for further in-depth study of French grammar.