Auxiliary Verbs, auf französisch

Anyone who has read Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers and St. Clare’s series knows of the legendary terror French verbs struck into the hearts of British schoolchildren of a certain age. No Maiwand or Isandhlwana could have stopped the might of the British Empire, but the slightest whiff of l’imparfait subjonctif would reduce the stoutest-hearted Viceroy into a whimpering schoolboy. At least this was the impression I had of the power of French verbs over the British psyche while growing up.

The French verbal system is no doubt more complicated than the English system, but this hardly means it’s utterly chaotic. With just a little bit of memorization and a little bit of thought (and some occasional hand-waving and some rather more frequent hand-wringing) it is possible to tame the system of conjugation. One of the reasons for the infamous difficulty of the French system is that it preserves many more synthetic (single-word) forms of its verbs than English does.




So what do we have in French? Three tenses: the present (le présent), the preterite (le passé simple), and the future (le futur). There is one further aspectual distinction drawn in the past tense through the use of a synthetic form, which is the imperfect (l’imparfait). A modal distinction is drawn in the future through another synthetic form, producing the so-called conditional mood (le conditionnel). The présent and the imparfait come in two moods, indicative (l’indicatif) and subjunctive (le subjonctif).

We could, of course, organize these seven forms differently. Instead of grouping them as we have done, we could group them by verbal stem, which would give us

• the present stem, from which arise 
• the présent de l’indicatif and 
• the présent du subjonctif
• and derived from the présent de l’indicatif is the imparfait de l’indicatif;
• the future stem, which is almost always just the infinitive itself, from which arise 
• the futur and 
• the conditionnel;
• the preterite stem, which is often related to the past participle, from which we get 
• the passé simple 
• and derived from the passé simple is the imparfait du subjonctif.

In addition to these synthetic forms, we have a number of compound forms that make use of auxiliary verbs. As with English, the auxiliary verb is the one that is conjugated in a particular tam, and the main verb remains in an unconjugated (usually participial) form. Thus we have:

• from the auxiliary in the présent indicatif or subjonctif, the present perfects:
• the passé composé de l’indicatif and 
• the passé composé du subjonctif;
• from the auxiliary in the imparfait indicatif or subjonctif, the pluperfects: 
• the plus-que-parfait de l’indicatif and
• the plus-que-parfait du subjonctif;
• from the auxiliary in the futur, the future perfect (futur antérieur)
• from the auxiliary in the conditionnel, the future perfect conditional (passé conditionnel)
• from the auxiliary in the passé simple, the past perfect (passé antérieur)

And of course, every one of these 14 different verbs can be either active or passive, generating one more layer of complexity.

As with English, French uses non-modal auxiliary verbs to convey semantic and syntactic nuances. There are many similarities between the English and French auxiliary verb systems.

• As with English, French uses two non-modal auxiliary verbs, avoir (“to have”) and être (“to be”). 
• As with English, both avoir and être are also full-blown verbs in their own right, operating independently of their role as auxiliary verbs. 
• The structure of the French auxiliary construction involves a conjugated form of the auxiliary verb combined with a past participle of the main verb, just as it does in English (although this is not entirely identical in the two languages).
• Both English to be and French être are also used to form all passive voice constructions.

There are, however, a number of differences between the English and French auxiliary verbs.

• Whereas English uses the construction to be + gerund to indicate a progressive or continuous aspect to the main verb, French does not do so. In the present tense, this is built into the French verb itself: thus, while in English I eat (habitually) is different from I am eating (currently, continuously, or progressively) in French we would use je mange for both. In the past tense, French uses the separate imparfait verbal form to indicate progression or continuation.
• Whereas English possesses modal auxiliary verbs, French does not. This is a major, major structural difference between the two languages, and indeed between the Germanic languages (English, Dutch, and German, among others) on the one hand and the Romance (French, Spanish, Italian, and the like).
• Whereas English possesses only one non-modal auxiliary verb (to have) to indicate the perfect aspect, French uses both avoir and être for the same semantic function.

Now, while it was possible to speak of English verbs as possessing principal parts, this is not quite the case in French because French verbs are far more inflected. Instead, it makes more sense to speak of a French verb as possessing a number of different verbal stems in addition to the usual suspects like the past participle and present participle.

To take an example, the exceedingly regular verb parler (“to speak”) has the following parts:

• present stem: parl–
• preterite stem: parl–
• future stem: parler–
• present participle ‘stem’: parlant–
• past participle ‘stem’: parlé–

As noted above, one can use the three verbal stems to generate the other synthetic verbal forms such as the conditionnel and the imparfait subjonctif. And I will explain the use of the word ‘stem’ in the last two forms presently (no pun intended). But before that, it is extremely important to remember that a lot of verbs, especially the most frequently used, are much more complicated. Verbs not only have different stems for different tenses, but may go so far as to switch stems within the same tense. Thus, looking at the regular verb parler and the trickier verb boire (“to drink”):

• présent de l’indicatif
• I speak: je parle; I drink: je bois
• We speak: nous parlons; we drink: nous buvons
• They speak: ils parlent; they drink: ils boivent
• présent du subjonctif
• [It is necessary that] I speak: (que) je parle; [that] I drink: (que) je boive 
• [It is necessary that] we speak: (que) nous parlions; [that] we drink: (que) nous boivions
• [It is necessary that they speak: (que) ils parlent; that they drink: (qu’) ils boivent
• imparfait de l’indicatif
• I was speaking: je parlais; I was drinking: je buvais
• We were speaking: nous parlions; we were drinking: nous buvions
• They were speaking: ils parlaient; they were drinking: ils buvaient

To return to an earlier point of digression, I used the word ‘stem’ with the present and past participles earlier. The reason for this is that French, unlike English, is an intrinsically gendered language, so that every single noun is either masculine or feminine in gender. Furthermore, since adjectives must agree in gender with the nouns they modify, it follows that the participles agree (but only in some cases, not all) with the nouns they modify. In general, the bare form of the participle, the so-called ‘stem’, represents the masculine singular; we add an –e to make it feminine and an –s to make it a plural.

This is by no means a complete look at the complex verbal system of French, but it gives us a sense of what we're up against once we get into the intricacies of the auxiliary verbs.