🗣️ 13. Verbs

The French verb inflects for person and number (three persons, two numbers), tense and mood; voice is periphrastic. A verb has a few stems and a set of endings, and a second set of forms made with an auxiliary and the past participle. On paper the system is large: a regular verb has forty-five simple finite cells (six persons in five indicative and conditional tenses and two subjunctive tenses, plus three imperative forms), and the compound tenses double them. In speech it is smaller, because the written endings of the -er verbs (parle, parles, parle, parlent) are all /paʁl/, so the subject clitic carries person and number, and because whole tenses (the passé simple, the imperfect subjunctive) are absent from conversation.

This chapter gives the groups (§1), stems and principal parts (§2), the simple tenses and moods with their paradigms (§§3–9), the auxiliaries and compound tenses (§10), the agreement of the past participle (§11), pronominal verbs (§12), the passive and the causative as verb forms (§13), periphrases and modals (§14), and the tense profile of writing and speech (§15). The irregular verbs one by one are in 14. Irregular verbs; the clitic pronouns before the verb in 12. Determiners, pronouns and numerals; the subjunctive in subordinate clauses in 24. Coordination and subordination; the passive as a construction in 28. Voice and the passive.

Counts are from the UD 2.18 French treebanks (UD_French-GSD, -Sequoia, -ParisStories, -Rhapsodie, -FQB, -PUD; all .conllu files of each, train + dev + test), made on 2026-11-06. "Finite forms" are the words with VerbForm=Fin, VERB and AUX together: 24 877 in GSD, 3 888 in Sequoia, 4 074 in Rhapsodie, 4 472 in ParisStories.

1. The groups

The school grammars sort the verbs into three groups:

New verbs enter group 1 (texter, googler, ghoster); group 2 grows only on a few adjectives (verdir, maigrir; 17. Derivation II: suffixes). Group 3 is a remainder, not a class. Bescherelle's L'art de conjuguer (bescherelle-1848) already rejected the four school models (-er, -ir, -oir, -re) because one model cannot cover appeler, céder, jeter, manger or sentir, ouvrir, tenir: its preface counts 44 different infinitive endings in -er alone and concludes that about a hundred models are needed, plus some hundred verbs conjugated on their own. The three groups are a teaching convention.

The most frequent verbs are the most irregular. Among the finite forms of full verbs (VERB, not AUX) in GSD the commonest lemmas are avoir (684), pouvoir (574), faire (380), devoir (289), trouver (182), permettre (181), aller (172), devenir (167), prendre (152) and être (141; the copula and auxiliary uses are AUX). Only trouver is in group 1.

2. Stems, endings and principal parts

A verb is described by a few principal parts from which the conjugation follows. For group 1 the infinitive is enough.

Four rules give most of the system:

1. The imperfect is built on the nous stem: nous finissons → je finissais, nous prenons → je prenais. The one exception is être (j'étais).
2. The present participle uses the same stem (parlant, finissant, prenant), except étant, ayant, sachant.
3. The present subjunctive is built on the ils stem (ils prennent → que je prenne), and the 1pl and 2pl usually return to the nous stem (que nous prenions, que vous veniez).
4. The future and conditional are built on the infinitive, without the final -e of the -re verbs (vendre → vendr-), with a special stem in some twenty verbs (§5).

The tense endings are shared by nearly all verbs: imperfect -ais, -ais, -ait, -ions, -iez, -aient; future -ai, -as, -a, -ons, -ez, -ont after the stem in -r-; conditional -ais, -ais, -ait, -ions, -iez, -aient after the same stem. The future is historically the infinitive plus the present of avoir (Latin amare habeo → aimerai) and the conditional the infinitive plus its imperfect (Brunot, brunot-1899; see la/13-late-latin.md).

3. The present

The singular endings are -e, -es, -e in group 1 and in ouvrir, offrir, couvrir, souffrir, cueillir (j'ouvre), and -s, -s, -t elsewhere, with no -t after d (il vend, il prend). Partir, sortir, dormir, servir, sentir, mentir lose the stem consonant in the singular (je pars, je dors, je sers). Pouvoir, vouloir, valoir write -x, -x, -t (je peux, je veux, je vaux), an old spelling with no sound of its own. The plural -ons, -ez, -ent is near universal; the exceptions are vous êtes, vous dites, vous faites (and redites, but contredisez, interdisez, médisez, prédisez), and ils sont, ont, vont, font.

In speech. In group 1 four of the six cells are one sound, /paʁl/, and the subject clitic acts as a person prefix (12. Determiners, pronouns and numerals). In groups 2 and 3 the 3pl usually differs from the 3sg by a consonant the singular lacks: il finit /fini/ ~ ils finissent /finis/, il part /paʁ/ ~ ils partent /paʁt/, il prend /pʁɑ̃/ ~ ils prennent /pʁɛn/. The 1pl is rare in speech, because on + 3sg replaces nous + -ons (37. Register and variation): GSD has 310 first-plural finite forms (1.2%), ParisStories 3 of 4 472, against 782 tokens of on in ParisStories.

Uses. The present covers the moment of speech, general truths, habits, a scheduled future with a time adverb (Je pars demain), the narrative and headline present, and a state that began earlier and goes on, with depuis or il y a … que (Il habite ici depuis dix ans, English "has lived"). It is 78% of the finite forms of GSD (19 456), 64% of ParisStories and 82% of Rhapsodie (§15).

4. Spelling alternations of the stem

Group 1 stems are regular in sound but not always in spelling.

Two points need the sources. First, for the céder type Bescherelle gives the change "before e, es, ent only", keeping é "even in the future and conditional" as the Académie then wrote (je céderai), although the vowel is pronounced open. The 1990 rectifications (cslf-1990, II.3) align these futures with semer: je cèderai, je cèderais, j'allègerai, je considèrerai. Second, for the -eler/-eter verbs, which the traditional spelling splits between the doubling type and the accent type (il gèle, il achète, il harcèle, il halète), the rectifications (II.5) give all of them the grave accent (elle ruissèle, j'étiquète, il époussètera) except appeler, rappeler, jeter and its family. They also make the circumflex on i optional in paraître, connaître (il parait), keeping it in croître (il croît, against il croit of croire) and in verb endings (cslf-1990, II.4; spelling in 06. Spelling rules: inflection, compounds, hyphens and the 1990 rectifications). Both spellings are correct; the treebanks have the traditional ones.

Group 3 stems. In the present, group 3 verbs have two or three stems:

• singular vs plural: partir (par-/part-), suivre (sui-/suiv-), vivre (vi-/viv-), écrire (écri-/écriv-), connaître (connai-/connaiss-), craindre, peindre, joindre (crain-/craign-);
• three stems, the ils stem with the vowel of the singular and the consonant of the plural: prendre (prend-/pren-/prenn-), venir, tenir (vien-/ven-/vienn-), boire (boi-/buv-/boiv-), devoir, recevoir (doi-/dev-/doiv-), pouvoir (peu-/pouv-/peuv-), vouloir (veu-/voul-/veul-), mourir (meur-/mour-/meur-);
• suppletion: être (suis, es, est, sommes, êtes, sont), aller (vais, vas, va, allons, allez, vont; future ir-, subjunctive aill-).

In prendre, venir, tenir the alternation is between a nasal vowel in the singular and an oral vowel plus a nasal consonant in the 3pl (vient /vjɛ̃/, viennent /vjɛn/), the nasal alternation of 02. Vowels.

5. Imperfect, future, conditional

Finir: finissais, finirai; vendre: vendais, vendrai; faire: faisais (pronounced /fəzɛ/), ferai. Four imperfect cells sound alike (/paʁlɛ/). Je parlerai and je parlerais differ only by /e/ against /ɛ/, a contrast many speakers no longer make (02. Vowels).

The future stems that are not the infinitive (full list in 14. Irregular verbs):

The future places an event after the moment of speech (Il viendra demain); it also states a supposition (Ce sera Paul), a mild order (Tu feras la vaisselle) and, in narration in the present, a later event. In speech it gives way to aller + infinitive (§14): the simple future is 855 finite forms in GSD (3.4%) and 202 in Sequoia, but 84 in Rhapsodie and 5 in ParisStories, where finite aller with an infinitive xcomp occurs 70 times.

The conditional is the future stem with the imperfect endings. Bescherelle counts it as a mood of its own beside the indicative, imperative, subjunctive and infinitive (five modes), and UD gives it Mood=Cnd; later school grammars made it a tense of the indicative (futur dans le passé). Its uses: the consequence of a hypothesis (Si j'avais le temps, je viendrais), politeness (Je voudrais un café), the future seen from the past (Il a dit qu'il viendrait), and in the press an unconfirmed report: Il aurait alors distribué des terres aux Gascons qui l'auraient aidé (GSD fr-ud-dev_00947), Le renforcement de la présence policière y serait pour beaucoup (fr-ud-dev_01340). GSD has 431 present conditionals (1.7%), Sequoia 146 (3.8%), Rhapsodie 89, ParisStories 47.

6. The passé simple

The passé simple presents a past event as complete and cut off from the present, and it is a tense of writing: narrative, history, biography, encyclopedias, mostly in the third person, with the imperfect for the background (Il pleuvait quand il arriva). In conversation the passé composé replaces it. GSD has 1 592 (Mood=Ind|Tense=Past, 6.4% of finite forms): 1 311 third singular, 275 third plural, 5 first singular, 1 first plural. Sequoia has 122, Rhapsodie 2, ParisStories none.

The stem is not predictable from the infinitive (naître → naquit, vivre → vécut, conduire → conduisit, mourir → mourut) and only partly from the participle: boire, croire, lire, plaire, connaître and most -oir verbs have u in both (bu/but, lu/lut, voulu/voulut), but the -dre, -ttre, -pre verbs have a participle in -u and a passé simple in -i (vendu/vendit, rendu/rendit, battu/battit, rompu/rompit), and so do voir (vu/vit), vêtir (vêtu/vêtit), venir, tenir (venu/vint). The first and second plurals (nous parlâmes, vous finîtes) are rare even in writing.

GSD examples: Elles furent victimes de la Révolution française (fr-ud-dev_00058); le M10 prit le nom d'Achilles (fr-ud-dev_00287); C'est lui qui recruta le successeur de Graham (fr-ud-dev_00665). The forms fût, eût with a circumflex are imperfect subjunctive, and the treebank keeps writers' confusions of the homophones: Cet ancien couvent … fût un temps transformé (fr-ud-train_03428, for fut); Abelforth en eût assez (fr-ud-train_10483, for eut). A tagger that reads only forms cannot recover the intended tense.

The passé antérieur (il eut fini, elle fut partie) is the compound tense paired with the passé simple, after quand, lorsque, dès que, après que for an event completed just before the main one (Dès qu'il eut fini, il partit). Speech uses the surcomposé instead: une fois que j'ai eu fini la conduite accompagnée (ParisStories_2019_peripitiesVoiture_14).

7. The imperfect

The imperfect is the past of the background: states and habits (Chaque été nous allions à la mer), an action in progress when another happens (Il lisait quand je suis entré), descriptions, indirect speech after a past verb, the condition in a si-clause (Si je pouvais, …), and some special uses: polite (Je voulais vous demander …), narrative in the press and fiction (Deux jours plus tard, il mourait), and hypocoristic, to children and pets (Alors, on était content ?). French has no grammatical progressive: the imperfect covers both English he read (habit) and he was reading. It is 8.1% of finite forms in GSD (2 027) and 32.8% in ParisStories (1 466), where speakers tell their stories in the passé composé over an imperfect background.

8. Subjunctive and imperative

8.1 The subjunctive

The present subjunctive has the endings -e, -es, -e, -ions, -iez, -ent on the ils stem: ils finissent → que je finisse, ils partent → que je parte, ils prennent → que je prenne, with the nous stem in the 1pl and 2pl where it differs (que nous prenions, que vous buviez, que nous voyions). Special stems:

The subjunctive is chiefly the mood of clauses introduced by que: il a fallu que je fasse les montages musicaux (ParisStories_2019_concoursEquitation_32), pour que je puisse rester manger (ParisStories_2019_patisserieFine_15). Its triggers (will, emotion, doubt, necessity; pour que, bien que, avant que; relatives of the type Je cherche quelqu'un qui sache) are in 24. Coordination and subordination. Independently it expresses a wish or third-person order (Qu'il vienne !, Vive la République !, Dieu veuille avoir en paix ton âme, GSD fr-ud-dev_00153) and a concession (qu'il soit appelé Yahvé, Dieu ou Allah, fr-ud-train_00669). GSD has 369 present subjunctives (1.5%), Sequoia 108, Rhapsodie 58, ParisStories 48.

A subjunctive clause normally cannot share its subject with the main verb (*Je veux que je parte; the infinitive is used: Je veux partir). This is obviation. In a formal acceptability study with speakers of European French, Feldhausen and Buchczyk (feldhausen-2021) found that of six factors claimed to weaken it only coordination clearly did (Je veux que tu partes et que je reste), and none made such sentences as good as grammatical controls; speakers differed.

The imperfect subjunctive is built on the passé simple stem: que je parlasse, qu'il parlât, qu'ils parlassent; qu'il finît, qu'il vînt, qu'il fût, qu'il eût, qu'il prît. Modern writing uses it only in the third singular, after a main verb in the past, and only in formal prose: ordonna que le château fût immédiatement rendu (fr-ud-train_01351), il était presque naturel qu'il continuât son œuvre (fr-ud-train_02098). Elsewhere the present subjunctive replaces it. GSD has 10 (Mood=Sub|Tense=Imp); Sequoia has 3 tagged Mood=Sub|Tense=Past (agrandisse, remplisse, aboutisse, forms that are also present subjunctives); the spoken corpora none. The 1990 rectifications keep the circumflex in these endings (qu'il fût, qu'il voulût, nous suivîmes) while making it optional elsewhere on i and u (cslf-1990).

8.2 The imperative

The imperative has three forms, 2sg, 1pl and 2pl, without a subject: Parle ! Parlons ! Parlez ! The 2sg drops its -s in group 1 and in aller, ouvrir, offrir, cueillir (Va, Ouvre), and takes it back before y and en (Vas-y, Parles-en). Être, avoir, savoir, vouloir use subjunctive stems: sois, aie, sache, veuille (veuillez mostly in formulas: veuillez patienter). Examples: Soyez concis, courtois et pertinents (fr-ud-dev_00959), Puis viens et suis-moi ! (fr-ud-dev_00823). Clitics follow an affirmative imperative (Dis-le-moi) and precede a negative one (Ne me le dis pas). GSD has 137 imperatives (0.6%), Rhapsodie 64, ParisStories 31. Instructions often use the infinitive (Ne pas déranger, Ajouter le sel).

9. Non-finite forms

Infinitive, present (parler) and past (avoir parlé, être parti). It follows prepositions (pour partir, sans parler, avant de partir), modal and aspectual verbs (Il peut venir), serves as a noun (Voir, c'est croire) and as an instruction. GSD has 6 170 infinitives, Sequoia 1 423, Rhapsodie 860, ParisStories 783.

Present participle and gerund. The participle in -ant is invariable (Le groupe, jouant à Paris, …). The gerund is en + participle, for manner or a simultaneous event with the same subject as the main verb: en accomplissant les vœux de la déesse (fr-ud-dev_00655); tout en adds concession or simultaneity (tout en endossant le rôle, fr-ud-dev_00683). An -ant form that agrees is a verbal adjective (une histoire passionnante), and some pairs differ in spelling: fatiguant/fatigant, différant/différent, négligeant/négligent, convainquant/convaincant, provoquant/provocant. A participle with its own subject is an absolute construction of written style (Le soleil se levant, nous partîmes). Among adverbial clauses headed by a participle (advcl with VerbForm=Part), those with en are 328 against 1 086 without in GSD, 15 against 71 in ParisStories, 37 against 170 in Sequoia.

Past participle: -é (group 1), -i (fini, parti, dormi), -u (vendu, voulu, connu), -s (pris, mis, assis), -t (dit, fait, écrit, ouvert, mort), and été, eu, né. It forms the compound tenses and the passive and serves as an adjective; its agreement is §11.

How the treebanks mark them. GSD and Sequoia have no Tense feature on any participle (GSD 13 769, of which 12 676 VERB; Sequoia 2 894) and no VerbForm=Ger: the present/past distinction is in the MISC column as Tense[denom]=Pres or Past, or must be read from the ending. Rhapsodie and ParisStories put Tense only on participles of auxiliaries (été, ayant, fait: 49 and 36 tokens). FQB and PUD mark every participle (FQB 35 present, 835 past; PUD 102 and 939); the sixteenth-century ALTS marks 1 198 of 2 530. This matters for Mova (§16).

10. Auxiliaries and compound tenses

A compound tense is an auxiliary, avoir or être, in a simple form plus the past participle.

10.1 Avoir or être

Avoir serves transitive verbs, most intransitives, and avoir and être themselves (j'ai eu, j'ai été). Être serves:

• a closed list of intransitives of motion or change of state: aller, venir, arriver, partir, entrer, sortir, monter, descendre, rester, tomber, naître, mourir, décéder, devenir, revenir, retourner, rentrer, passer, and compounds such as parvenir, survenir, intervenir, repartir. GSD: Chypre est entré en zone euro (fr-ud-dev_00869), est né le 1er février 1968 (fr-ud-dev_01108), le modèle … est resté sur place (fr-ud-dev_00831);
• every pronominal verb: Elle s'est levée, Les compétitions se sont déroulées (fr-ud-train_05273).

Monter, descendre, sortir, rentrer, passer, retourner take avoir with a direct object: Elle est sortie / Elle a sorti la voiture; Il est passé / Il a passé l'examen. A modal does not pass the infinitive's auxiliary on: Il a dû partir, never *Il est dû partir (Italian has è dovuto partire).

aux:tense is on 3 837 tokens in GSD (3 339 avoir, 498 être), 948 in Sequoia (844, 104), 492 in Rhapsodie (397, 95) and 1 012 in ParisStories (732, 280). Over these four corpora the non-pronominal être verbs are led by naître (67, from GSD's biographies), aller (65), devenir (57), partir (50) and arriver (49), all on the list above.

Variation. In Canadian French avoir spreads to être verbs. The Montréal interview studies summarised by Lauzon, Folli, Sevdali and Gerard (lauzon-2025) find avoir rates from under 10% (aller, venir, partir) to about 90% (tomber, passer), lower for frequent verbs and educated speakers; some Acadian varieties use avoir almost always. In child corpora the same paper finds French children's departures from the standard only with être verbs, absent from the adult input, so they are children's innovations.

10.2 The compound tenses

With être the participle agrees with the subject: nous sommes parti(e)s, elles sont parties, vous vous êtes levé(e)(s).

The passé composé is the ordinary past of speech, with an event reading (Il est arrivé hier) and a result reading (J'ai fini, "I am done"); Bescherelle calls it the passé indéfini, against the passé défini (the passé simple). The plus-que-parfait places an event before a past reference point (Siné qui avait parlé du fils de Sarkozy, fr-ud-dev_00172); the futur antérieur before a future point, or guesses about the past (Il aura oublié); the conditionnel passé gives an unreal past (Si j'avais su, je serais venu) or an unconfirmed report.

The auxiliary and the participle form a unit: negation surrounds the auxiliary (Il n'a pas parlé), short adverbs stand between them (Il a déjà fini), clitics precede the auxiliary (Il me l'a dit, fr-ud-test_00087), and in inversion the subject clitic follows it (A-t-il fini ?).

11. The agreement of the past participle

1. With être the participle agrees with the subject: Elle est partie; the passive too: elle est nommée ministre de la Culture (fr-ud-dev_01095). Pronominal verbs have their own rules (§12).
2. With avoir it agrees with a direct object that precedes it, and only then. The preceding object is a clitic (Je l'ai vue; Certains les ont même vus, fr-ud-train_00882), the relative que (les lettres qu'il a écrites), a fronted interrogative (Quelle maison as-tu vue ?), or a dislocated object resumed by a clitic (Ces livres, je les ai lus). Otherwise it stays masculine singular: J'ai vu la maison; Ils ont mangé des pommes.
3. As an adjective it agrees like one: une table cassée, les pays concernés.

The avoir participle is invariable when the object is en (Des pommes, j'en ai mangé; GSD also has the agreed On en avait vue une dizaine, fr-ud-dev_00067), with impersonal il (les chaleurs qu'il a fait), when the object is a clause (la maison qu'il a dit qu'il achèterait), and with courir, coûter, peser, valoir in their measure sense (les mille euros que ce livre m'a coûté; but les dangers qu'il a courus).

Why it is hard. The agreement is mostly silent: vu, vue, vus, vues are all /vy/. It is heard only where the feminine adds a consonant: mis/mise /mi/~/miz/, fait/faite, ouvert/ouverte, écrit/écrite, pris/prise. So it is taught as spelling, and writers err: ses paroles ont conduits ses compatriotes à la victoire (fr-ud-train_03882) agrees with the subject. Brunot (brunot-1899 §468) traces the history: Old French was drifting towards an invariable participle when a learned reaction stopped it halfway, leaving agreement usual where the object preceded; the grammarians still disagreed in 1705, and the modern rule of position was settled only with Condillac and Beauzée (1767). He calls most of the detailed rules conventional and arbitrary, citing les chaleurs qu'il a fait / les récoltes qu'il a faites.

Kobayashi (kobayashi-2022) sets out the data a theory must cover: no agreement with an object in place, obligatory agreement with a derived subject (passive, être verbs), and in actual usage optional agreement with a preceding clitic or wh-object (Ces sottises, Jean ne les a jamais faites/fait). She derives it from two agreement relations, one leaving the participle in its default form, one, open only to a displaced object, giving it gender and number. For a parser the point is that the trigger is a configuration, the object's function and its position before the participle, which a dependency tree shows.

Counts. In the avoir compound tenses the participle (the head of an aux:tense avoir) has Gender=Fem or Number=Plur in 515 of 3 339 cases in GSD (15%), 197 of 844 in Sequoia (23%), 46 of 397 in Rhapsodie (12%) and 73 of 732 in ParisStories (10%).

12. Pronominal verbs

A pronominal verb has a reflexive clitic agreeing with the subject (me, te, se, nous, vous) and always takes être.

The participle's agreement follows the function of se:

• se direct object: agreement (Elle s'est lavée; ils se sont consultés, fr-ud-train_06603).
• se indirect object: no agreement (Ils se sont parlé, Elles se sont téléphoné, Six directeurs se sont succédé). If a direct object follows, se is indirect and the participle agrees only with a preceding object: Elle s'est lavé les mains but les mains qu'elle s'est lavées. Se plaire, se déplaire, se complaire, se rire, se nuire, s'en vouloir are invariable for the same reason (Elles se sont plu).
• inherently pronominal and middle verbs: agreement with the subject (Elle s'est évanouie, Les compétitions se sont déroulées); s'arroger agrees with a preceding direct object (les droits qu'elle s'est arrogés).

The 1990 rectifications make laissé + infinitive invariable, including the pronominal use, as fait + infinitive already was: elle s'est laissé mourir, elle s'est laissé séduire, je les ai laissé partir (cslf-1990). The rest of the participle rules is unchanged.

In UD the clitic of an inherent pronominal is expl:pv (1 017 in GSD, 242 in Sequoia, 118 in ParisStories, 74 in Rhapsodie); the clitic of the reflexive passive is expl:pass (686 in GSD); fixed clitics as in s'en aller, il y a are expl:comp (211 in GSD, 246 in ParisStories); a true reflexive is obj or iobj. Of the 498 être aux:tense in GSD, 246 belong to a verb with such a reflexive or expletive clitic and 252 to a verb of the motion list; in ParisStories the motion verbs dominate, 192 to 88 (je suis allée en prépa, ParisStories_2019_prepaScientifique_9). (Pronominal here: the participle has a dependent expl:pv, expl:pass, expl:comp or a Reflex=Yes pronoun.)

13. The passive and the causative

13.1 The passive

The passive is être + past participle agreeing with the subject: Il est acheté par le collectionneur néerlandais Gerard Meerman (fr-ud-dev_00640), Les écuries … ne furent jamais réalisées (fr-ud-train_03540); compound tenses use été (où ils ont été conduits, fr-ud-train_03972). The agent takes par, or de with verbs of feeling and state (aimé de tous, entouré de ses amis). Only a direct object can become the subject: English He was given a book has no literal French match; French says On lui a donné un livre, or formally the impersonal Il lui a été donné un livre. Speech prefers on, the reflexive passive (Ça se vend bien) or the active.

aux:pass is on 3 401 tokens of GSD (3 380 être, 21 faire), 759 in Sequoia and 247 in FQB, but 134 in Rhapsodie and 105 in ParisStories: one passive auxiliary per 7.3 finite forms in GSD, one per 43 in ParisStories. No other verbal construction separates writing and speech as sharply. Être + participle is thus three-ways ambiguous, an action passive (La porte est ouverte chaque matin par le gardien), a resulting state (La porte est ouverte), or a compound tense (Il est parti); UD separates aux:pass (Voice=Pass on the participle), aux:tense and the copula cop with an adjectival participle, and the line between passive and state is the annotator's. The construction and its alternatives are in 28. Voice and the passive.

13.2 The causative

Faire + infinitive makes the infinitive's subject an object of faire: accusative when the infinitive has no object (Je les fais rire), dative when it has one (Je fais lire un livre aux enfants, Je leur fais lire un livre). The clitics go before faire: ses enfants le lui font remarquer (fr-ud-train_04603). Laisser and the perception verbs (voir, entendre, sentir, regarder) allow both this pattern and an ordinary object + infinitive (Je l'ai vu partir). The reflexive of the infinitive is often dropped after faire (Je les fais asseoir). The participle fait before an infinitive is invariable (Je les ai fait partir); with a perception verb the participle traditionally agrees with a preceding object only when that object performs the infinitive's action (Les enfants que j'ai vus jouer against Les chansons que j'ai entendu chanter); laissé is invariable in the rectified spelling. In UD the causative faire is aux:caus (250 in GSD, 34 in Sequoia, 27 in Rhapsodie, 16 in ParisStories).

14. Periphrases and modals

Periphrases of a finite verb and an infinitive mark tense, phase and modality. In UD they are full verbs with an xcomp, not auxiliaries.

Finite aller with an infinitive xcomp occurs 115 times in GSD (96 present, 18 imperfect), 113 in Rhapsodie, 70 in ParisStories and 12 in Sequoia; compare the simple future, 855, 84, 5 and 202 (§5). The imperfect allait + infinitive is the future in the past (Il allait partir quand le téléphone a sonné). Finite venir with an infinitive marked by de occurs 24, 11, 4 and 5 times; it must be told from venir de "come from" (Son nom vient de « Ulmus », fr-ud-train_00347).

Modals. Devoir: obligation (Il doit partir), probability (Il doit être malade); pouvoir: possibility, ability, permission, and in the conditional a polite request; vouloir: wish, and with bien consent (Je veux bien); savoir: learned ability (Elle sait nager); falloir: necessity (il faut partir, il faut que tu partes). As VERB in any form:

Speech is rich in savoir (much of it je sais pas) and falloir, writing in devoir. The sense is not in the form: in 221 transcribed interviews Colli, Rossini and Battistelli (colli-2024) found material possibility and ability (alethic in Gosselin's scheme) the commonest senses of pouvoir, ahead of permission, and a fine-tuned FlauBERT classifier told the senses apart with F1 0.94; Colli and Battistelli (colli-2025) find pouvoir frequent in written and spoken corpora alike, its polysemy an obstacle to measuring a text's modality.

Clitics of the infinitive stay on it (Il veut le voir). The older Il le veut voir (clitic climbing) was obligatory until Middle French and gone before the nineteenth century, in Olivier, Sevdali and Folli's corpus of legal texts (olivier-2023); with faire and laisser clitics still climb (Il le fait venir).

15. The tenses in writing and speech

Written French has the full system; spoken French drops the passé simple, the passé antérieur and the imperfect and pluperfect subjunctive, and uses the passé composé for events, the imperfect for background, and aller + infinitive for the future. The finite forms by tense and mood, as a percentage of each corpus's finite forms:

The auxiliary of a compound tense is itself a finite form, so the present row includes the avoir and être of the passé composé. The two spoken corpora differ by genre: Rhapsodie is mixed speech, mostly in the present; ParisStories is personal stories told in the past. Both lack the passé simple and nearly lack the simple future.

Sequence of tenses. After a main verb in the past, indirect speech shifts the present to the imperfect, the future to the conditional and the past to the pluperfect (Il a dit qu'il viendrait). The subjunctive after a past main verb is in formal writing the imperfect subjunctive (§8.1), elsewhere the present. The details are in 24. Coordination and subordination.

16. How Mova handles it

No French verb morphology. Mova has no French conjugation tables, stems, alternation rules or lemmatiser; the English Morph::lemmatize/inflect (en/src/morph.rs) are not used for French. French treebanks are read by the English tagger and parser after en xpos-fill IN OUT, which fills the empty XPOS column from UPOS and FEATS (xpos_fill, xpos_of in en/src/main.rs). For VERB and AUX, xpos_of tests, in this order:

On GSD, the baseline treebank, no participle carries Tense and none is VerbForm=Ger (§9), so both VBG branches never fire: all 13 769 participles, the 1 699 in -ant among them (accomplissant, étant), become VBN, and only the suffix features separate present from past participles. On FQB and PUD, which mark Tense, the present participles do become VBG (35 and 102), a tag a GSD-trained model never saw for French. Among finite forms the passé simple, the imperfect and the imperfect subjunctive become VBD; the present, future, conditional, present subjunctive and imperative become VBZ (3sg) or VBP. Mood, future and conditional are invisible in the tag; whatever needs them must go back to FEATS.

Baseline. On GSD (UD 2.18, train → dev, 2026-10-22) en parse-eval gives LAS 87.00 with the tagger's own tags and 89.78 with tags derived from the gold FEATS (What every language gets); tagging accuracy on unknown words is 84.8%. Unseen forms concentrate in the rarer tenses. Of the dev VERB/AUX tokens whose form is absent from the training file (counted 2026-11-06, fr_gsd-ud-train.conllu → fr_gsd-ud-dev.conllu): 5.4% of present indicatives, 7.6% of infinitives, 8.3% of present subjunctives, 13.9% of participles, 15.8% of imperfects, 20.6% of passés simples, 26.3% of conditionals, 28.0% of futures and 9 of 15 imperatives; 10.3% of all verb tokens. The regular endings (-èrent, -aient, -erait, -eront) are what a suffix model can learn; the irregular stems (furent, vînt, saura) are not.

UD conventions it inherits (guillaume-2019, demarneffe-2021):

• A compound tense is AUX + aux:tense, with the participle as head; clitics, negation and the subject attach to the participle: in Il me l'a dit (fr-ud-test_00087) dit is the root and Il, me, l', a depend on it.
• The passive is aux:pass with nsubj:pass and obl:agent; the causative faire is aux:caus; the copula is cop with the predicate as head (5 560 in GSD).
• Periphrases are not auxiliaries: in vient de perdre (fr-ud-train_09520) perdre is the xcomp of the root vient, with de (ADP) as its mark; in va être divisé (fr-ud-train_04657) divisé is the xcomp of va and être its aux:pass. The gerund is an advcl with en as mark (fr-ud-dev_00655).
• Impersonal il, and in fr-ud-dev_00655 the inverted -il, are expl:subj.

Agreement is not handled. The features it needs (gender and number on the participle and on a preceding object) are in the treebank but lost in VBN; the parser does not know that a preceding les or que calls for an agreed participle. GSD keeps writers' agreement and tense errors (ont conduits, fr-ud-train_03882; fût for fut, fr-ud-train_03428), so it can test a checker but is not a clean paradigm.

Not done, and the first steps. No auxiliary choice, no mood or tense in the tag, no sequence-of-tenses check, no modal-sense disambiguation. The steps this chapter supports, in order: (1) make xpos_of read Tense[denom] from MISC, or the -ant ending, so that GSD's present participles become VBG, and measure the change on GSD dev and on FQB/PUD; (2) a conjugation generator from the principal parts of §2 and the alternations of §4, written as data, with a test that regenerates every (lemma, Mood, Tense, Person, Number) cell of the GSD train file and lists the misses, each one a new rule or an annotation error; (3) a deterministic participle-agreement rule over the tree (§11), checked on the GSD participles.

Sources for this chapter

• Louis-Nicolas Bescherelle, L'art de conjuguer (1848): preface (four models rejected, 44 infinitive endings in -er, about a hundred models), the five moods, passé défini/indéfini, the céder and lever notes. bescherelle-1848, public domain.
• Ferdinand Brunot, Précis de grammaire historique de la langue française (1899): the future and conditional from infinitive + avoir; §468, the history of participle agreement. brunot-1899, public domain.
• Conseil supérieur de la langue française, Les rectifications de l'orthographe (1990): II.3 (futures of the céder type), II.4 (circumflex), II.5 (-eler/-eter), the participle of laisser. cslf-1990, official text.
• Akiko Kobayashi, Past participle agreement in French and Italian: a two-Agree analysis, Glossa 7(1), 2022. kobayashi-2022, CC BY 4.0.
• Balthazar Lauzon, Raffaella Folli, Christina Sevdali & Juliana Gerard, Acquisition of auxiliary selection in French and Italian and the role of input, Glossa 10(1), 2025. lauzon-2025, CC BY 4.0.
• Ingo Feldhausen & Sebastian Buchczyk, Revisiting subjunctive obviation in French: a formal acceptability judgment study, Glossa 6(1), 2021. feldhausen-2021, CC BY 4.0.
• Anna Colli, Diego Rossini & Delphine Battistelli, A modal sense classifier for the French modal verb pouvoir, CLiC-it 2024. colli-2024, CC BY 4.0. Anna Colli & Delphine Battistelli, Exploration de la modalité en français parlé et écrit, TALN 2025. colli-2025, CC BY 4.0.
• Marc Olivier, Christina Sevdali & Raffaella Folli, Clitic climbing and restructuring in the history of French, Glossa 8(1), 2023. olivier-2023, CC BY 4.0.
• Bruno Guillaume, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe & Guy Perrier, Conversion et améliorations de corpus du français annotés en Universal Dependencies, 2019. guillaume-2019, CC BY 4.0. Marie-Catherine de Marneffe et al., Universal Dependencies, 2021. demarneffe-2021, CC BY 4.0.
• UD 2.18 French GSD, Sequoia, ParisStories, Rhapsodie, FQB, PUD, ALTS (ud-treebanks-v2.18): counts of 2026-11-06; examples quoted only from GSD and ParisStories (CC BY-SA 4.0), with sent_id.
• Mova: en/src/main.rs (xpos_fill, xpos_of), en/src/morph.rs, What every language gets.

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