Grammar
Main article: French grammarFrench grammar shares several notable features with most other Romance languages, including:
- the loss of Latin's declensions
- only two grammatical genders
- the development of grammatical articles from Latin demonstratives
- new tenses formed from auxiliaries
French declarative word order is subject–verb–object, although if the object is a pronoun, it precedes the verb. Some types of sentences allow for or require different word orders, in particular inversion of the subject and verb like "Parlez-vous français ?" when asking a question rather than just "Vous parlez français ?" Both questions mean the same thing, however, a rising inflection is always used on both of them whenever asking a question, especially on the second one. Specifically, the first translates into, "Do you speak French?" while the second one is literally just: "You speak French?"
Read more about this topic: French Language
Famous quotes containing the word grammar:
“Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.”
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“Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.”
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“Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.”
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