French Grammar - Verbs

Verbs

In French, as in English, a verb is the controlling element in most sentences, Verbs are conjugated to reflect the following information:

• a mood (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, conditional1, infinitive, participle, or gerundive2);
• a tense (past, present, or future, though not all tenses can be combined with all moods)
• an aspect (perfective or imperfective);
• a voice (active, passive2, or reflexive2).

Some of these features are combined into seven tense–aspect–mood combinations. The simple (one-word) forms are commonly referred to as the present, the simple past or preterite3 (past tense, perfective aspect), the imperfect3 (past tense, imperfective aspect), the future, the conditional1, the present subjunctive, and the imperfect subjunctive forms. However, the simple past and the imperfect subjunctive are rarely used in modern, spoken French.

Footnotes:

1. In some of its uses, the conditional acts as a tense of the indicative mood; in other uses, including the use from which it takes its name, it acts as a distinct mood.
2. The gerundive mood, the perfect, and the passive and reflexive voices are not synthetic; that is, they are expressed using multi-word verb forms.
3. The preterite and imperfect are sometimes called, somewhat redundantly, the preterite past and imperfect past. The preterite is also called the simple past, a translation of its French name (le passé simple).

Verbs in the finite moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, and conditional) are also conjugated to agree with their subjects in person (first, second, or third) and number (singular or plural), but as in English, the subject must be included except in the imperative mood. In other words, unlike other Romance languages, French is neither a null subject language nor a pronoun-dropping language.

French also combines the simple forms of helping verbs with the past participles of main verbs; it sometimes uses the verb "être" (to be) and sometimes uses the verb "avoir" (to have) as the auxiliary in the compound past.

The imperative mood derives its conjugation normally from the present subjunctive.