French Grammar and Usage

Roger Hawkins, Richard Towell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317530695
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Long trusted as the most comprehensive, up-to-date and user-friendly grammar available, French Grammar and Usage is a complete guide to French as it is written and spoken today. It includes clear descriptions of all the main grammatical phenomena of French, and their use, illustrated by numerous examples taken from contemporary French, and distinguishes the most common forms of usage, both formal and informal.

Key features include:

Comprehensive content, covering all the major structures of contemporary French

User-friendly organisation offering easy-to-find sections with cross-referencing and indexes of English words, French words and grammatical terms

Clear and illuminating examples help students at all stage of their degree

Useful indications of what cannot be said as well as what can

Revised and updated throughout, this new edition offers updated examples to reflect current usage, new headers to include chapter number and section parts as well as enhanced cross-referencing for easier reference and expanded and more nuanced explanations of notoriously difficult points of grammar.

The combination of reference grammar and manual of current usage is an invaluable resource for students and teachers of French at the intermediate to advanced levels.

This Grammar is accompanied by the Practising French Grammar: A Workbook (ISBN 978-1-13-885119-1) which features related exercises and activities and a companion website offering additional resources at www.routledge.com/cw/hawkins.

1 Nouns

1.1 Types of noun

A noun is a word that typically refers to an entity or concept of some kind, e.g. livre ‘book’, ami ‘friend’, bière ‘beer’, bonheur ‘happiness’, and is the main constituent of the subject of a clause, the object of a verb or the object of a preposition. French nouns may co-occur with articles (le livre ‘the book’, un ami ‘a friend’) and modifying adjectives (un roman français ‘a French novel’, mon cher ami ‘my dear friend’). There are different subclasses of noun, typically determined by meaning, that have different distributional properties which are described in this chapter: abstract (bonheur ‘happiness’, beauté ‘beauty’), concrete (bière ‘beer’, roman ‘novel’), mass (eau ‘water’, beurre ‘butter’), count (bouteille ‘bottle’, billet ‘ticket’), collective (comité ‘committee’, gouvernement ‘government’) and proper (names) (Jean-Pierre, France). French nouns belong to one of two gender classes – masculine or feminine (le bâtiment ‘the building’, but la maison ‘the house’) – and they may vary in form when they are singular or plural (cheval ‘horse’, but chevaux ‘horses’). Nouns can be simple (une cour ‘a yard’, un marteau ‘a hammer’) or compound (une basse-cour ‘a farmyard’, un marteaupiqueur ‘a pneumatic drill’). Compound nouns have their own rules for gender and number assignment (see 1.2.11 and 1.3.9).

1.1.1 Abstract versus concrete nouns

Concrete nouns refer to entities with physical attributes which can be seen, heard, touched, etc. Abstract nouns refer to entities without such physical attributes:

Typical concrete nouns
bière (f)	beer
bonbon (m)	sweet
cadeau (m)	present
carte (f)	card
disque (m)	disk
église (f)	church
livre (m)	book
mannequin (m)	(fashion) model

Typical abstract nouns
beauté (f)	beauty
bonheur (m)	happiness
bonté (f)	goodness
patience (f)	patience
mœurs (f pl)	customs, morals
savoir (m)	knowledge
silence (m)	silence
soif (f)	thirst

Abstract nouns in French are usually accompanied by a definite article whereas English has no article:

• La patience est une qualité qui se fait rare
• Patience is a quality which is becoming rare

• Je cherche le bonheur
• I’m looking for happiness

But when abstract nouns refer to a particular example of ‘patience’, ‘happiness’, ‘knowledge’, and so on (for instance, when they are modified by an adjective), they occur with an indefinite article:

• Il a fait preuve cette fois d’une patience appréciable
• The patience he showed on this occasion was considerable

• Il s’est alors produit un silence absolu
• Absolute silence ensued

• Un bonheur en vaut un autre
• One kind of happiness is the same as any other

(See Chapter 2 for definite and indefinite articles.)

1.1.2 Mass versus count nouns

Count nouns identify individual entities, and usually have both singular and plural...