15. Adjectives and adverbs
The French adjective agrees in gender and number with the noun or pronoun it qualifies, wherever it stands. Its default place is after the noun, against the English default, and a short list of very common adjectives goes before it, some with a change of meaning. Adverbs do not agree; the large class of manner adverbs in -ment is built on the feminine of the adjective. This chapter covers the classes of adjectives (§1), agreement (§2), the feminine and plural (§§3–4), invariable adjectives (§5), position (§6), complements and other roles (§7), comparison (§8), the adverb class (§9), the adverbs in -ment (§10), the position of adverbs (§11) and the counts (§12). Word classes as a whole are in 10. Word classes, noun gender in 11. Nouns, adjective-forming suffixes in 17. Derivation II: suffixes.
The counts are on six modern UD French treebanks, GSD, Sequoia, ParisStories, Rhapsodie, FQB and PUD (UD 2.18, all train, dev and test files, 606 575 syntactic words, counted 2026-11-06), unless GSD alone is named. Examples are quoted from GSD with their sent_id.
1. Classes of adjectives
| class | examples | behaviour |
|---|---|---|
| qualifying | grand, petit, joli, rouge, heureux, intelligent | gradable (très grand, plus grand), attributive and predicative, position varies |
| relational | français, national, présidentiel, solaire, politique | derived from a noun, "relating to X"; not gradable; after the noun; hardly predicative (une visite présidentielle, but not *cette visite est très présidentielle) |
| ordinal and identifying | premier, deuxième, dernier, prochain, seul, même, autre | mostly before the noun |
| traditional "indefinite adjectives" | certain, divers, différents, tel, quelque, chaque, nul, aucun | many of them DET in UD: 12. Determiners, pronouns and numerals |
| participial | cassé, fatigué, charmant, ouvert, connu | participles used as adjectives; agree (§7.3) |
The six treebanks have 34 083 ADJ tokens, 5.6% of the words. The adjectives most often after a noun are all relational or of nationality: français 521 times after a noun and never before, national 257, américain 235, politique 232, européen 208, général 192, international 184 (1 before), public 154, mondial 142.
2. Agreement
An attributive adjective (un livre rouge), a predicate adjective (la maison est grande), an adjective in apposition (Fatiguée, elle est rentrée) and an object complement (je la trouve belle) agree in gender and number with what they qualify. Much of the agreement is only written: joli/jolie/jolis/jolies sound alike, while grand/grande (/gʁɑ̃/, /gʁɑ̃d/) do not, and the plural is heard only in liaison.
Of the 34 083 ADJ tokens, 13 123 are masculine singular (38.5%), 11 334 feminine singular (33.3%), 5 113 masculine plural (15.0%) and 4 203 feminine plural (12.3%); 310 lack gender, number or both in the annotation (invariable or unmarked forms).
Cases that need a rule:
- Several nouns: the adjective is plural, and masculine if the genders differ (un homme et une femme contents). After nouns joined by ou, it agrees with all of them or, if it qualifies only one, with the nearer.
- A noun with a complement: the adjective agrees with the noun it means (une foule de gens furieux; la majorité des Français est satisfaite or sont satisfaits).
- After an indefinite pronoun: quelqu'un d'intéressant, rien de nouveau, quoi de neuf ?, personne de sérieux: masculine singular, introduced by de.
- Avoir l'air: the adjective agrees with the subject (elle a l'air fatiguée) or with air (elle a l'air fatigué); both are accepted.
3. The feminine
The feminine adds a written -e, which makes a final consonant audible, with changes for some endings:
| masculine | feminine | examples |
|---|---|---|
| in -e | same | rouge, jeune, large, pauvre, facile |
| most others | + -e | petit → petite, grand → grande, joli → jolie, vert → verte, bleu → bleue |
| -er | -ère | premier → première, léger → légère, cher → chère |
| -x | -se | heureux → heureuse, jaloux → jalouse; but doux → douce, roux → rousse, faux → fausse, vieux → vieille |
| -eur (verb-related) | -euse | trompeur → trompeuse, menteur → menteuse; literary -eresse (vengeur → vengeresse, enchanteur → enchanteresse) |
| -teur (no verb in -ter) | -trice | créateur → créatrice, protecteur → protectrice |
| -eur (Latin comparatives) | -eure | meilleur → meilleure, supérieur → supérieure, majeur → majeure |
| -f | -ve | actif → active, neuf → neuve, bref → brève |
| -el, -eil | -elle, -eille | cruel → cruelle, pareil → pareille |
| -en, -on | -enne, -onne | ancien → ancienne, bon → bonne; but -in, -ain, -un add only -e (fin → fine, vain → vaine, brun → brune) |
| -et | -ette | muet → muette, net → nette; but -ète in complet, concret, discret, inquiet, secret, replet |
| -ot | -ote, a few -otte | idiot → idiote; sot → sotte, vieillot → vieillotte |
| -s | -se or -sse | gris → grise, français → française; gras → grasse, gros → grosse, bas → basse, épais → épaisse |
| -c | -que or -che | public → publique, turc → turque, grec → grecque; blanc → blanche, franc → franche, sec → sèche |
| -gu | -guë | aigu → aiguë, ambigu → ambiguë; 1990 spelling aigüe, ambigüe, the diaeresis on the pronounced vowel (cslf-1990; 06. Spelling rules: inflection, compounds, hyphens and the 1990 rectifications) |
| irregular | beau → belle, nouveau → nouvelle, fou → folle, mou → molle, jumeau → jumelle, long → longue, malin → maligne, bénin → bénigne, favori → favorite, frais → fraîche, tiers → tierce |
The prevocalic masculine. Beau, nouveau, fou, mou, vieux have a second masculine singular before a noun beginning with a vowel or mute h: bel, nouvel, fol, mol, vieil (un bel arbre, un nouvel ami, un vieil homme). It sounds like the feminine (/bɛl/, /nuvɛl/, /vjɛj/) and is spelt as the feminine without its final -le. As ADJ in the six treebanks: nouveau 190, nouvel 29; beau 35, bel 8; vieux 34, vieil 7; the feminines nouvelle 161, belle 35, vieille 25. Un nouvel album devrait voir le jour en 2008 (fr-ud-dev_01084); les frontières du nouvel État (fr-ud-dev_01236). Before a plural noun and after the noun the main form is used (de beaux arbres, un homme vieux).
The nationality adjective has no capital (la cuisine française); the noun has one (un Français). Gender-inclusive forms (étudiant·e·s) are treated with the nouns, 11. Nouns.
4. The plural
The plural adds -s; adjectives in -s or -x do not change (gris, heureux, faux). Those in -eau take -x (beaux, nouveaux), as does hébreu (hébreux), but bleu has bleus. Most adjectives in -al have -aux: national → nationaux, principal → principaux, général → généraux (transporteurs nationaux et internationaux, fr-ud-dev_00708). A minority keep -als: banal, bancal, fatal, natal, naval, causal, tonal; final and glacial have both plurals. The written -s is silent except in liaison (de grands arbres /dəgʁɑ̃zaʁbʁ/; 04. Connected speech: enchaînement, liaison, elision, the mute e and assimilation).
5. Invariable adjectives
- Nouns used as colour words: des yeux marron, des robes orange, des chaussures cerise, des murs crème (also kaki, saumon, turquoise, paille, argent). The old adjectives and a few nouns long naturalised as colours agree: rose, mauve, pourpre, fauve, écarlate, vermeil, incarnat (des robes roses).
- Compound colour terms are invariable: des yeux vert foncé, des chemises bleu marine, des drapeaux bleu-blanc-rouge.
- Loans and colloquial words: chic (no feminine), kitsch, standard, bon marché, bon enfant; usage varies for snob, sympa, cool, super (des amis sympas is common).
- Before the noun, by origin adverbs or participles: demi (une demi-heure, but une heure et demie), nu (nu-pieds, but les pieds nus), feu "late" before the determiner (feu la reine, but la feue reine), ci-joint, ci-inclus, excepté, passé, vu, y compris, étant donné (ci-joint les pièces, but les pièces ci-jointes).
- The adverb tout before an adjective is invariable except before a feminine adjective that begins with a consonant or aspirated h: une toute petite île rocheuse (fr-ud-train_07397), c'est tout petit (fr-ud-train_08155), tout heureuse (mute h), toute honteuse (aspirated h), tout étonnée. The written agreement follows the pronunciation: /tut/ is heard in toute petite and, by liaison, in tout étonnée.
- Adjectives used as adverbs (§7.2) and the numerals vingt, cent (12. Determiners, pronouns and numerals).
Même is an adjective before the noun (les mêmes personnes), an emphatic adjective after it (les enfants mêmes) and an adverb (même les enfants). In the six treebanks it is ADV 442 times and ADJ 381 times, 359 of these as an amod before its noun.
6. Position
6.1 The facts
Of the 26 882 ADJ tokens attached to a NOUN by amod, 8 300 (30.9%) stand before the noun and 18 582 (69.1%) after. The adjectives most often before the noun, with their uses before and after:
| adjective | before | after | adjective | before | after |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| premier | 968 | 12 | jeune | 151 | 12 |
| tout | 657 | 0 | meilleur | 146 | 5 |
| grand | 580 | 7 | deuxième | 133 | 0 |
| autre | 575 | 5 | second | 123 | 0 |
| nouveau | 388 | 32 | haut | 97 | 7 |
| petit | 364 | 3 | troisième | 82 | 0 |
| même | 359 | 1 | propre | 80 | 20 |
| ancien | 251 | 21 | certain | 77 | 2 |
| bon | 235 | 6 | long | 74 | 16 |
| nombreux | 221 | 7 | vieux | 64 | 3 |
| dernier | 213 | 68 | beau | 62 | 0 |
| seul | 207 | 12 | vrai | 61 | 2 |
Two groups go before: short, very frequent qualifying adjectives (grand, petit, bon, beau, jeune, vieux, gros, joli, long, haut) and adjectives of identification and quantity (premier, deuxième, dernier, autre, même, seul, certain, nombreux). Several alternate: principal 73 before / 82 after, différent 58/65, important 53/107, tel 49/80, prochain 37/32, moyen 22/48, actuel 17/65, majeur 12/59. Examples: un petit requin bathy-benthique (fr-ud-dev_01053), un grand nombre d'attestations (fr-ud-dev_01543), le meilleur restaurant Japonnais de Caen (fr-ud-dev_00292, the spelling is the source's).
6.2 What decides
The school rule says that a preposed adjective is subjective, evaluative or figurative and a postposed one distinguishing and literal. The linguistic literature, as Metheniti et al. (metheniti-2023) summarise it, finds adjectives mobile but with strong individual preferences: some accept only anteposition, some only postposition, some alternate. The factors they list:
- The adjective itself. Ordinals in -ième are nearly always before; exotique, idéal, populaire, moderne, naturel always after; énorme, immense, superbe alternate. Colour adjectives, though frequent, are always after outside fixed expressions, and adjectives derived from nouns strongly prefer postposition.
- Length and frequency. Short frequent adjectives (bon, beau) tend to precede; long and derived ones follow.
- Dependents. An adverb on the adjective pushes it to the right or allows both orders; a prepositional complement forces postposition (une femme fière de son fils); several adjectives favour postposition.
- Meaning, for the adjectives of §6.3, and lexicalisation: les arts premiers "non-Western arts" against les premiers arts "the first arts"; la grasse matinée.
In their experiments a baseline that gives every adjective its most frequent position in the training data was already accurate, and fine-tuned French transformer models reached 0.99 accuracy on web text and about 0.9 or more on the UD test sentences for most models. On a set of hard sentences rated by native speakers, the speakers made no mistakes on fixed expressions while the models erred on very common ones, la grasse matinée among them. For a tool the lesson is that a lexicon storing each adjective's preferred position predicts most of what is predictable; fixed expressions need their own entries.
In literary style a normally postposed adjective may go before for effect (une magnifique journée, la sombre forêt). Numerals precede the descriptive adjectives (les deux premiers jours, ces trois grandes villes); two preposable adjectives may both go before (un joli petit village) or split around the noun (un beau jardin fleuri).
6.3 Meaning changes with position
| before the noun | after the noun |
|---|---|
| un grand homme "a great man" | un homme grand "a tall man" |
| un ancien collègue "a former colleague" | un meuble ancien "an antique piece of furniture" |
| un pauvre homme "a poor wretch" | un homme pauvre "a man without money" |
| ma propre maison "my own house" | une maison propre "a clean house" |
| un cher ami "a dear friend" | un livre cher "an expensive book" |
| un brave homme "a decent man" | un homme brave "a brave man" |
| un seul homme "a single man, only one" | un homme seul "a lonely man" |
| le même jour "the same day" | le jour même "that very day" |
| un certain succès "some success" | un succès certain "an assured success" |
| différents livres "various books" | des livres différents "books that differ" |
| un sale type "a nasty fellow" | des mains sales "dirty hands" |
| un simple employé "a mere clerk" | un employé simple "an unpretentious clerk" |
| un vrai problème "a real problem" | une histoire vraie "a true story" |
Dernier and prochain split by reference: before the noun they order a series (la dernière semaine du mois, la prochaine fois, la prochaine étape), after a time noun they count from now (la semaine dernière, l'année prochaine). Hence dernier 213 before and 68 after, prochain 37 and 32.
7. Complements and other roles
7.1 Complements
Many adjectives take a complement with a fixed preposition: fier de, content de, capable de, sûr de, conscient de, responsable de, prêt à, habitué à, fidèle à, sensible à, semblable à, riche en. The complement may be an infinitive (content de partir) or a clause, in the subjunctive after adjectives of emotion (content que tu viennes; 23. Complementation). An adjective with a complement follows the noun.
7.2 Adjectives as adverbs
Some adjectives serve as invariable adverbs in fixed verb collocations: parler fort, parler bas, voir clair, coûter cher, travailler dur, chanter faux, sentir bon, s'arrêter net, tenir bon, viser juste. The productive adverb is the one in -ment. The treebanks annotate them inconsistently: in the six treebanks, juste (29), fort (9), haut (4) and net (1) attached to a verb are ADV advmod, while cher after coûter is ADJ with xcomp (3), and bas and haut are often NOUN in an oblique.
7.3 Participles and verbal adjectives
The present participle in -ant is invariable (une personne parlant français); the verbal adjective in -ant agrees (une histoire passionnante). Some pairs differ in spelling: participle fatiguant, convainquant, provoquant, communiquant, différant, négligeant, excellant against adjective fatigant, convaincant, provocant, communicant, différent, négligent, excellent. The past participle used as an adjective agrees (une table cassée); the choice between VERB and ADJ for it in the treebanks is in 10. Word classes.
7.4 Nominalised adjectives and de before a preposed adjective
A determiner makes an adjective a noun phrase: le beau, les riches, un ancien, le vrai (18. Compounding, conversion and the minor processes). In formal writing the plural indefinite des becomes de before a preposed adjective: de grands arbres, de belles maisons; speech often keeps des grands arbres.
8. Comparison
8.1 The comparative
The comparative is plus (superiority), aussi (equality) or moins (inferiority) before the adjective or adverb, with que before the second term: La junk-food rend aussi accro que les drogues dures ! (fr-ud-dev_00056); la pandémie a été un peu moins mortelle que les pires saisons grippales (fr-ud-test_00182). Under negation si may replace aussi (il n'est pas si grand que lui). Quantity takes plus de, moins de, autant de; plus de + number is "more than" (un choix de plus de 10'000 bijoux, fr-ud-dev_00993). The second term is a strong pronoun (plus grand que moi, never *que je) or a clause, which may contain an expletive ne in formal style (plus grand qu'il ne pense; 27. Negation). The difference is introduced by de (plus grand de dix centimètres); progression is de plus en plus, correlation plus … plus (plus on travaille, plus on gagne).
The adverbs attached by advmod to an ADJ head are plus 889, très 596, pas 210, ne 190, tout 86, trop 84, assez 75, aussi 71. Plus covers the comparative, the superlative and ne … plus; ne and pas are there because in UD a predicate adjective heads its clause and the copula depends on it (il n'est pas grand: ne and pas attach to grand).
8.2 Synthetic comparatives
| positive | comparative | note |
|---|---|---|
| bon | meilleur | not *plus bon; aussi bon, moins bon are regular |
| bien (adverb) | mieux | not *plus bien |
| mauvais | pire or plus mauvais | both current; pire is the usual one for abstract and moral badness |
| mal (adverb) | pis or plus mal | pis survives in set phrases (tant pis, de mal en pis, au pis aller) |
| petit | moindre or plus petit | moindre abstract (le moindre effort), plus petit for size |
All five continue Latin comparatives (melior, peior, minor, melius, peius). In the six treebanks: meilleur 173, mieux 88, pire 15, moindre 14. The learned adjectives from Latin comparatives, supérieur, inférieur, antérieur, postérieur, ultérieur, extérieur, intérieur, take à, not que (supérieur à la moyenne), like préférable à.
8.3 The superlative
The relative superlative is the comparative with a definite article or a possessive: le plus grand, la moins chère, mon meilleur ami. After the noun the article is repeated (le puits le plus profond de France, fr-ud-dev_00044); before it there is one article (la plus belle ville, ma plus belle robe). The domain takes de (de France) or parmi, d'entre. With an adverb the article is the invariable le (c'est elle qui court le plus vite). Possible after a superlative is invariable (le plus de gens possible).
The absolute superlative uses très, fort, bien, extrêmement, tout à fait + adjective, a prefix (archi-, super-, ultra-, hyper-, extra-; 16. Derivation I: prefixes) or, on a few adjectives, -issime (rarissime, richissime); speech has vachement, super, trop, hyper, tellement, drôlement. Très modifies adjectives and adverbs, not verbs (*il l'aime très); beaucoup modifies verbs, and adjectives only in the comparative (beaucoup plus grand, not *beaucoup grand). Très has 858 ADV tokens, 596 of them on an adjective.
9. The adverb class
Adverbs are invariable. They modify a verb, an adjective, another adverb or a clause, and some focus a noun phrase (même les enfants, seulement trois).
| class | examples |
|---|---|
| manner | bien, mal, vite, ensemble, volontiers, exprès, ainsi; most adverbs in -ment |
| degree and quantity | très, trop, assez, peu, beaucoup, tant, tellement, si, plus, moins, presque, tout |
| time | hier, aujourd'hui, demain, déjà, encore, toujours, jamais, souvent, parfois, tôt, tard, ensuite, alors, enfin, maintenant, bientôt, longtemps |
| place | ici, là, ailleurs, partout, près, loin, dessus, dessous, dedans, dehors, autour |
| sentence adverbs and connectives | heureusement, probablement, peut-être, sans doute, donc, pourtant, cependant, d'ailleurs, aussi, également, notamment |
| negation and polarity | ne, pas, plus, jamais, guère, point, oui, non, si (27. Negation) |
| interrogative and relative | où, quand, comment, pourquoi, combien (26. Questions) |
The six treebanks have 25 852 ADV tokens. The most frequent lemmas: ne 2 495, pas 2 214, plus 2 088, très 858, où 805, donc 768, alors 631, bien 614, aussi 607, également 451, même 442, là 432, ainsi 426, non 395, tout 379, lors 368, que 331, parce 328, moins 304, enfin 303, encore 300, vraiment 271. Lors is the adverb of lors de and lors même que, and parce the first word of parce que, annotated as an ADV with que as its fixed dependent; que as ADV is mostly the restrictive ne … que (289 of its 331 tokens follow a ne). Ne, pas, plus and jamais alone make 6 966 tokens, more than a quarter of the class: the adverb class is dominated by function words, and the derived adverbs in -ment are a long tail (§10).
Adverbial phrases built with a preposition are numerous and fixed: à peine, en vain, peu à peu, tout à fait, d'abord, à présent, de temps en temps, en fait, au moins, en tout cas (19. The lexicon: layers, borrowings, multiword expressions and register). GSD marks them as fixed expressions whose first word carries ExtPos=ADV: in un peu moins mortelle (fr-ud-test_00182) un is advmod with ExtPos=ADV and peu is its fixed dependent.
Degree adverbs. Si and tellement are exclamative or consecutive (il est si grand que …). Assez is "enough" or "fairly", trop "too (much)". Bien is manner ("well"), degree (bien grand) and emphasis (il fait bien froid).
10. Adverbs in -ment
10.1 Formation
The suffix -ment is added to the feminine of the adjective: lente → lentement, heureuse → heureusement, douce → doucement, franche → franchement, active → activement, longue → longuement. Brunot (brunot-1899) explains why: the suffix is the Latin ablative mente "with a … mind", first combined with adjectives that could qualify a mind (prudente mente for classical prudenter), then emptied of meaning and attached to any adjective; and mens was feminine.
| adjective | adverb | examples |
|---|---|---|
| general rule | feminine + -ment | lent → lentement, large → largement, rapide → rapidement, sec → sèchement, naturel → naturellement |
| masculine in a vowel | masculine + -ment | vrai → vraiment, poli → poliment, absolu → absolument, aisé → aisément, forcé → forcément |
| in -ant | -amment | constant → constamment, brillant → brillamment, courant → couramment |
| in -ent | -emment | évident → évidemment, prudent → prudemment, fréquent → fréquemment, récent → récemment |
| -ément | stem + -ément | précis → précisément, profond → profondément, énorme → énormément, intense → intensément, confus → confusément, aveugle → aveuglément, commode → commodément, conforme → conformément |
Both -amment and -emment are pronounced /amɑ̃/ (prudemment /pʁydamɑ̃/).
History of the exceptions. Clédat (cledat-1894, §§447–450) explains the irregular groups. Old French had adjectives with one form for both genders (grant, fort, loyal, gentil, prudent, constant), so their adverbs had no -e-: granment, fortment, loyaument, gentiment. Most were remade on the later feminine (grandement, fortement, loyalement), but gentiment survived, and so did the adverbs of the adjectives in -ant, -ent, whose nasal vowel fused with the suffix: constamment, prudemment. Lent always had the feminine lente, hence lentement; présentement and véhémentement follow that model by analogy, while violemment follows the other. After a vowel the feminine e was dropped in spelling (vraiement, poliement → vraiment, poliment), first marked by a circumflex that survives in a few words (assidûment, dûment).
Other irregular adverbs: gentil → gentiment, bref → brièvement, grave → grièvement (only of injuries: grièvement blessé), impuni → impunément. Suppletive pairs: bon/bien, mauvais/mal, meilleur/mieux. Adjectives of state (content, malade, enceinte), of colour and of nationality give no adverb, and many participles do not either (*cassément), but relational adjectives do freely: historiquement, politiquement, économiquement, structurellement (dans un contexte structurellement raciste, fr-ud-dev_00003).
10.2 Spelling details
- -ûment. Assidûment, continûment, crûment, dûment, goulûment, indûment have a circumflex in the traditional spelling. The 1990 rectifications make the circumflex on u optional except in verb endings and in dû, mûr, sûr, jeûne and the forms of croître, and say expressly that derived words do not keep it (
cslf-1990, II.4): so assidument, dument, crument. Absolument, éperdument, résolument never had it. - Gai gives gaiement or, older, gaîment.
- The acute accent of -ément is not predictable from the adjective (énormément, uniformément, conformément but sobrement, pauvrement, rudement): it is a list. In the treebanks précisément 23, énormément 17, profondément 12, conformément 9.
10.3 Frequency and productivity
The six treebanks have 4 076 ADV tokens in -ment, in 418 lemmas; 213 of the tokens are comment, which is not a derived adverb, so the derived ones are 3 863 tokens in 417 lemmas, 164 lemmas occurring once (two fifths of the types). The most frequent: également 451, vraiment 271, notamment 229, seulement 113, finalement 96, rapidement 74, particulièrement 74, principalement 60, généralement 60, actuellement 54, simplement 52. The -amment/-emment adverbs total 403 tokens, more than half of them notamment; then récemment 35, évidemment 27, apparemment 17, fréquemment 15. The long tail is the productivity of the suffix: Brunot already noted that the language "forms new ones every day" (inépuisablement, inconstitutionnellement).
The ending alone does not make an adverb. In GSD (UD 2.18, all files), the 4 268 tokens whose form ends in -ment are 2 497 ADV (58.5%), 1 677 NOUN (39.3%: gouvernement, moment, développement, mouvement), 57 VERB (forment, affirment: third plurals in -ent after m), 32 PROPN and 5 X; by distinct form, 374 of 690 (54.2%) are adverbs and 272 nouns. Of the 31 dev tokens in -ment whose form is not in the training file, 14 are adverbs and 14 nouns. A suffix rule must therefore look at the base: -ment after a known feminine adjective (rapide-ment, heureuse-ment), -amment/-emment after an adjective in -ant/-ent, or -ément on a known adjective; nouns in -ment are built on verb stems (gouverne-ment, développe-ment; 17. Derivation II: suffixes).
10.4 Other adverb patterns
Adverbs are also made with en + adjective or noun (en vain, en secret, en particulier), à la + feminine adjective (à la française), de façon / de manière + adjective (d'une manière générale), by repetition (tout doucement, peu à peu) and by the old suffix -ons (à reculons, à tâtons).
11. The position of adverbs
11.1 Adverbs on a verb
The finite verb in French precedes the adverb, and so does the auxiliary: il parle bien, elle voit souvent ses amis, on y mange correctement (fr-ud-dev_00087); in compound tenses a short adverb stands between auxiliary and participle (il a bien parlé, il a déjà fini; Le gardien algérien a lui aussi laissé filer le ballon, fr-ud-dev_00051). Unlike English, the adverb does not stand between subject and finite verb (*il souvent mange). Pirvulescu et al. (pirvulescu-2022) give the pattern with souvent: after a simple finite verb, between the auxiliary and the participle in a compound tense, and between aller and the infinitive (il va souvent m'appeler); after the participle or the infinitive it is acceptable only as an afterthought with its own prosodic unit. In the cartographic analysis they adopt (Cinque's), the adverb has a fixed slot, and French finite verbs move above it while participles and infinitives stay below. Longer adverbs, and adverbs of time and place, tend to follow the participle (il est parti hier, il a parlé longuement).
Adverbs attached by advmod to a VERB or AUX head in the six treebanks:
| adverb | after the head | before | before, after an auxiliary of the head |
|---|---|---|---|
| aussi | 230 | 106 | 73 |
| également | 208 | 132 | 108 |
| bien | 134 | 132 | 66 |
| toujours | 95 | 59 | 45 |
| encore | 94 | 36 | 15 |
| déjà | 65 | 109 | 77 |
| souvent | 59 | 62 | 34 |
| jamais | 49 | 105 | 84 |
The last column is the position between auxiliary and participle; the head of a compound tense is the participle. Déjà and jamais prefer that slot; aussi, également, encore more often follow the lexical verb. Pas depends on a verb 1 572 times: 1 110 after the head (il ne vient pas), 360 between an auxiliary and the participle (il n'est pas venu) and the rest, about a hundred, before an infinitive without auxiliary (ne pas venir).
11.2 Adverbs on adjectives and adverbs
The degree adverb precedes what it modifies (très grand, assez bien, bien trop tard): Travail de très grande qualité (fr-ud-dev_00005). A preposed adjective takes a short degree adverb (un très grand homme); a longer adverb sends the adjective after the noun (un homme extrêmement grand).
11.3 Sentence adverbs
A sentence adverb (heureusement, évidemment, probablement, franchement, peut-être, sans doute) stands at the start with a comma, after the finite verb or auxiliary (il est heureusement venu), or at the end. After peut-être, sans doute, aussi, à peine, ainsi at the start of the clause, formal French inverts the subject (Peut-être viendra-t-il, Sans doute a-t-il raison; 29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure). When several adverbs co-occur their order follows a hierarchy; the French version that Pirvulescu et al. compile from Cinque runs from the speech-act adverb down: franchement > heureusement > évidemment > probablement > maintenant > peut-être > forcément > généralement > encore > souvent > exprès > vite > déjà, and further toujours, bientôt, complètement, bien. Fronted adverbs (Hier, il est venu) are topics; même and seulement before a noun phrase are focus adverbs.
12. Counts
Six treebanks (GSD, Sequoia, ParisStories, Rhapsodie, FQB, PUD; UD 2.18; 606 575 words; 2026-11-06) unless marked GSD. ALTS (sixteenth century) and ParTUT (non-commercial) are not counted.
| fact | count |
|---|---|
ADJ tokens | 34 083 (5.6%) |
ADJ by gender and number | MS 13 123; FS 11 334; MP 5 113; FP 4 203; incomplete 310 |
ADJ as amod of a NOUN | 26 882: before 8 300 (30.9%), after 18 582 |
| most often before | premier 968; tout 657; grand 580; autre 575; nouveau 388; petit 364; même 359 |
| most often after | français 521; national 257; américain 235; politique 232; européen 208 |
advmod of an ADJ | plus 889; très 596; pas 210; ne 190; tout 86; trop 84; assez 75; aussi 71 |
| synthetic comparatives | meilleur 173; mieux 88; pire 15; moindre 14 |
| prevocalic masculines | nouveau 190 / nouvel 29; beau 35 / bel 8; vieux 34 / vieil 7 |
ADV tokens | 25 852 (4.3%) |
derived ADV in -ment | 3 863 tokens, 417 lemmas, 164 occurring once (plus comment 213) |
ADV in -amment/-emment | 403 (notamment 229) |
| GSD forms in -ment | 4 268: ADV 2 497 (58.5%), NOUN 1 677 (39.3%) |
13. How Mova handles it
- Tags.
en xpos-fill(xpos_ofinen/src/main.rs) maps every FrenchADJtoJJ, whatever its degree (there is noJJRorJJS, so meilleur and moindre are plainJJ), and everyADVtoRB, or toWRBwhen it carriesPronType=IntorRel. Gender and number are dropped, so agreement is invisible to the parser and nothing checks it. - Position. The parser learns adjective position from the training treebank only; no rule or lexicon states the preferred positions of §6 or the meaning changes of §6.3, and nothing distinguishes un grand homme from un homme grand.
- Unseen words. The tagger (
en/src/ptag.rs, an averaged perceptron with a TnT suffix prior fromen/src/tag.rs) tags a word it has not seen from its letters, its neighbours and the built-in English dictionary hint, which can mislead on French forms that are also English words (comment, moment, important). Its accuracy on unseen words is 84.8% (GSD train → dev, UD 2.18, 2026-10-22). The French -ment ending is learnt only as a suffix statistic; as §10.3 shows, that statistic is close to a coin toss between adverb and noun for new words, and a gain would need the base adjective, which Mova has no lexicon to supply. - Treebank conventions the parser must learn. A predicate adjective is the head of its clause, with the copula as
cop; a resultative or object-complement adjective isxcomp(accro of rend, fr-ud-dev_00056). In a comparison the que iscase(SCONJ) on the second term, which isobjof the degree adverb (drogues of aussi, fr-ud-dev_00056; saisons of moins, fr-ud-test_00182). A postposed superlative isnmodof the noun, notamod(profond in fr-ud-dev_00044, with le asdetand plus asadvmodof the adjective). These differ from the English conventionsenwas built on and are learnt from the French training data alone. - Measured. LAS on GSD dev is 87.00 with the parser's own tags and 89.78 with gold tags (UD 2.18, train → dev, 2026-10-22, What every language gets); no per-class score for adjectives or adverbs has been measured. The counts of this chapter describe the treebanks, not Mova's output.
- Not done. An adjective lexicon with its feminine and plural forms, preferred position, meaning changes and derived adverb; agreement checking; the invariable list of §5; the synthetic comparatives; the order of sentence adverbs. Such a lexicon could be checked against the counts of §6.1 and §10.3.
Sources for this chapter
- Metheniti, Van de Cruys, Kerkri, Thuilier & Hathout 2023, "Chère maison" or "maison chère"? Transformer-based prediction of adjective placement in French (Findings of EACL; CC BY 4.0),
metheniti-2023: factors of placement, the frequency baseline, model accuracies, fixed expressions and native speakers. - Pirvulescu, Hill, Nacif, Petrescu & Helms-Park 2022, The acquisition of adverbs in child L3 French in Canada (Glossa; CC BY 4.0),
pirvulescu-2022: adverb placement and verb movement, the French adverb hierarchy compiled from Cinque. - Clédat, Grammaire raisonnée de la langue française (1894),
cledat-1894, §§447–450: the history of gentiment, -amment/-emment, lentement, and the dropped e after a vowel. - Brunot, Précis de grammaire historique de la langue française (1899),
brunot-1899: the Latin mente and the productivity of -ment. - Conseil supérieur de la langue française, Les rectifications de l'orthographe (1990),
cslf-1990: the diaeresis of aigüe, the circumflex on u and its derived words. - UD 2.18 French GSD, Sequoia, ParisStories, Rhapsodie, FQB, PUD: counts of 2026-11-06; examples quoted from GSD (CC BY-SA 4.0) with
sent_id. - Mova:
en/src/main.rs(xpos_fill,xpos_of),en/src/ptag.rs,en/src/tag.rs; baselines in What every language gets.
This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/15-adjectives-adverbs/