🗣️ 23. Complementation

What a French verb takes after it is fixed by the verb: a direct object, an object with à or de, a clause with que, a bare infinitive, an infinitive with à or with de, or a combination of these. Two facts set French apart from English. The first is the pair of grammatical prepositions à and de, which carry most of the indirect objects and most of the infinitive complements, and whose choice cannot be predicted from the meaning: commencer à partir but finir de manger, penser à quelqu'un but parler de quelqu'un. The second is the pronoun system: an object or a prepositional complement that is a pronoun becomes a clitic before the verb (le, lui, y, en), and the clitic shows what kind of complement it replaces. This chapter gives the complement types, the objects and prepositional arguments, the finite complement clauses, the infinitive complements with control and raising, the causative and perception verbs, and the predicative complements, with the UD analysis and counts. The choice of mood in a complement clause is in chapter 24; the clitics and their order in chapter 21 and the pronouns chapter; the passive in chapter 28.

Contents:

1. Overview: the complement types
2. Direct objects
3. Indirect objects and the dative
4. Prepositional arguments: obl:arg
5. Finite complement clauses
6. Infinitive complements
7. Control and raising
8. Causative and perception verbs
9. Predicative complements
10. Missing and implicit objects
11. How Mova handles it
12. Sources

1. Overview: the complement types

The commonest forms of clausal complement in GSD (UD 2.18, all three files, 2026-11-06) are the infinitive xcomp: 1 284 bare, 838 with de, 562 with à, 55 with other prepositions (par, pour); the finite or infinitive ccomp is 1 435, of which 916 have que, 235 have de (infinitives that GSD annotates as ccomp) and 46 à. The verbs that govern the bare infinitive are led by pouvoir (535), devoir (237), aller (134) and vouloir (79); those with de by permettre (104), décider (88), tenter (62); those with à by commencer (44) and parvenir (42).

Which preposition a verb takes is lexical. There are tendencies — à for a goal, a beginning, an aim (aboutir à, commencer à, chercher à, inciter à), de for a source, an end, a cause (finir de, cesser de, se plaindre de, s'excuser de) — but no rule. A verb can change meaning with the preposition (décider de partir "decide to leave", se décider à partir "make up one's mind to leave"; jouer à un jeu / jouer d'un instrument; penser à "think of" / penser de "think about, have an opinion on"; manquer à quelqu'un "be missed by" / manquer de quelque chose "lack"). The lists are in every reference grammar (fraser-1921, §§278–281), and they are the content of a valency lexicon (§11).

2. Direct objects

A direct object is a noun phrase, a clitic (le, la, les, me, te, se, nous, vous), en with a quantity, or a clause. In GSD obj is 13 596 words (340 per 10 000 words); in the spoken ParisStories 437 per 10 000, because the spoken clause has more verbs and fewer nouns.

The clitic object stands before the verb, or before the auxiliary in a compound tense (Je l'ai vu), or after a positive imperative (Prends-le). In UD it is obj of the main verb, whatever its place (chapter 21, §7).

The en object. A partitive or indefinite object that is replaced by a pronoun becomes en: Tu as du pain ? — J'en ai. Il a trois enfants → Il en a trois. The quantity word stays after the verb. In GSD en is iobj 112 times and obj when it is the whole object.

The object of light verbs. Avoir lieu, faire partie, mettre fin, prendre part, faire face, donner lieu — the noun is not a referring object but part of the predicate; GSD labels it obj:lvc (554 times; the commonest are avoir lieu and faire partie).

Agreement. A clitic object (and a relative que) before a past participle with avoir makes the participle agree with it: Les lettres que j'ai écrites. Je les ai vues. The rule is in the auxiliaries chapter; an analysis of past participle agreement in French and Italian derives its optionality with a fronted object from a choice between two kinds of agreement operation, and its obligatoriness with a derived subject (passive, unaccusative) from the structure of the clause (kobayashi-2022). The agreement is audible only in some participles (écrite /ekʁit/, prise /pʁiz/ against vue /vy/).

No double object. French has no dative shift: Il donne un livre à Marie, never *Il donne Marie un livre. A verb has at most one direct object.

3. Indirect objects and the dative

The à object of a person. Donner, dire, écrire, envoyer, montrer, prêter, promettre, permettre, demander take a direct object and an à-phrase for the recipient or addressee; obéir, plaire, ressembler, nuire, téléphoner, répondre, sourire take only the à-phrase. A pronoun recipient is the dative clitic lui, leur (me, te, nous, vous are both accusative and dative): Je lui donne le livre. Il leur obéit.

The UD analysis in GSD. Only the clitic is iobj; the noun phrase with à is obl:arg. Je donne le livre à Marie: Marie obl:arg with case à. Je lui donne le livre: lui iobj. In GSD there are 894 iobj, all of them pronouns: lui 270, y 114, en 112, vous 64, dont 57, nous 55, leur 50, se 43 (2026-11-06). The relative dont as iobj is the relative of a de-complement (le livre dont je parle), y of an à-complement of a thing (J'y pense).

Not every à-phrase is a dative. With penser, songer, renoncer, s'intéresser, faire attention, tenir, the à-complement of a person is not replaced by lui but kept as a strong pronoun: Je pense à elle (*Je lui pense). With a thing, both kinds take y: J'y pense. This distinguishes the true dative (lui) from a prepositional argument with à (strong pronoun or y) and is the test the grammars use.

The extended dative. French uses the dative clitic for a person affected by the event who is not a recipient:

• the possessor dative with body parts and close possessions, where English uses a possessive: Il lui a pris la main "He took her hand", Je me lave les mains "I wash my hands", On lui a volé sa voiture "Someone stole his car";
• the dative of interest (benefit or harm): Il lui a réparé son vélo "He repaired her bike for her";
• the ethical dative of speech, a first- or second-person clitic with no role: % Goûte-moi ça ! "Just taste that!"

These datives are iobj in UD like the recipient; the treebanks do not mark the difference.

Two clitics. A direct and an indirect clitic can combine in a fixed order (Il me le donne, Il le lui donne; chapter 21, §6.3), but a first- or second-person direct object cannot combine with a dative clitic: *Il me lui présente must be Il me présente à lui.

4. Prepositional arguments: obl:arg

GSD distinguishes the prepositional phrases a verb selects (obl:arg) from the adjuncts (obl:mod). In GSD (2026-11-06) the prepositional arguments of verbs are led by the preposition à (3 196), de (1 549), dans (831), avec (242), par (223), en (134); 469 have no preposition. The commonest verb–preposition pairs are naître à (262) and naître with a bare date or place (240), se situer dans (229) and à (135), faire de (126), participer à (123), s'agir de (106), donner à (83), mettre à (75), appartenir à (64), se composer de (58), parler de (50).

The figures show what the distinction captures and where it is a decision of the annotators: naître à Paris and se situer dans la région are arguments because the verb needs a place, while travailler à Paris is an adjunct. The French GSD changelog says the split was made by hand at first for a part of the treebank and extended by rule (chapter 20, §9), so the boundary in the data is that of the guidelines, not an independent test.

The pronoun test. The grammars tell an argument from an adjunct by its pronoun: an argument with à is replaced by y or lui, an argument with de by en or dont, while an adjunct is replaced by an adverb (là, alors) or not at all. Il participe au projet → Il y participe. Il parle de politique → Il en parle. Il travaille à Paris → Il y travaille — the last shows that y also replaces locative adjuncts, so the test is one-way: a phrase that cannot be replaced by y/en is an adjunct, one that can is not necessarily an argument.

Verbs with both an object and a prepositional argument. Accuser quelqu'un de, remercier quelqu'un de, prévenir quelqu'un de, empêcher quelqu'un de (object + de); inviter quelqu'un à, aider quelqu'un à, encourager quelqu'un à (object + à); demander quelque chose à quelqu'un, emprunter quelque chose à quelqu'un (object + à source).

Prepositions before a clause. A preposition cannot take a que-clause directly; the verbs with à and de insert ce: Je m'attends à ce qu'il vienne. Il tient à ce que tout soit prêt. Je me réjouis de ce que tu sois là. With de, the bare que is common: Je me réjouis que tu sois là. With à, ce que is required in the standard.

5. Finite complement clauses

The complementizer que is never omitted. Je sais qu'il viendra, never *Je sais il viendra (the English zero that has no French equivalent). Que elides to qu' before a vowel, and it is repeated before each coordinated clause: Il dit qu'il viendra et qu'il restera. In UD que is SCONJ mark of the verb of its clause, and the clause is ccomp of the governing verb.

What governs it. The governors of ccomp in GSD (2026-11-06) are led by permettre (110, mostly infinitives with de), falloir (106: il faut que …, il faut + infinitive), afin (88: the clause of afin que, afin de, which GSD attaches as a ccomp of afin), dire (71), savoir (47), penser (35), estimer (30), affirmer (29), montrer (27), noter (26) and plus (26, the comparative clause: chapter 22, §9). The verbs of saying and thinking are the core; most of them take the indicative (chapter 24).

Mood. The finite ccomp verbs of GSD are 395 indicative, 65 subjunctive and 40 conditional; 406 are infinitives and 529 non-verbal predicates (copular clauses). The subjunctive is governed by the verb: vouloir, souhaiter, falloir, douter, craindre and many others (chapter 24, §3).

Indirect questions are complement clauses introduced by si "whether" or a question word: Je me demande s'il viendra. Dis-moi où tu vas. They keep the order of a statement (chapter 26, §9). In GSD si introduces 14 ccomp.

Complement clauses of nouns and adjectives: l'idée que tout est possible (acl), heureux que tu sois là (ccomp of the adjective). See chapter 22.

Clausal subjects: Qu'il parte m'étonne is written French; speech extraposes with ça or il (Ça m'étonne qu'il parte). See chapter 21, §3.

6. Infinitive complements

The same-subject rule. French uses an infinitive instead of a que-clause when the subject of the complement is the same as the subject (or the object) of the main verb: Je veux partir, not *Je veux que je parte; Il croit vous avoir vu "He thinks he has seen you"; Dites-leur de s'en aller "Tell them to go away" (fraser-1921, §283). With verbs of will and emotion that take the subjunctive the rule is strict: a subjunctive clause whose subject is the same person as the main subject is ungrammatical. This disjoint-reference effect is called obviation. A formal acceptability study tested six factors proposed in the literature as weakening it (among them a passive, a periphrastic past, a negation and a modal in the subjunctive clause, and coordination) and found that, averaged over speakers, only coordination clearly did so — and only with the coreferent subject in the second conjunct (Je veux que tu restes et que je parte is rated far better than *Je veux que je parte et que tu restes*); individual speakers varied, and the authors conclude that the classic introspective judgments should not be taken as the general pattern (feldhausen-2021). With verbs of saying and thinking, which take the indicative, both forms are possible: Il pense qu'il a raison / Il pense avoir raison.

Bare infinitives follow the modals and quasi-modals (pouvoir, devoir, vouloir, savoir, falloir, valoir mieux, oser), the verbs of motion (aller, venir, partir, courir, monter, descendre, rentrer: Il va chercher le pain, Viens voir), the verbs of opinion and declaration with the same subject (croire, penser, espérer, affirmer, prétendre, déclarer), the verbs of preference (aimer, préférer, aimer mieux, désirer, détester), and the perception verbs and laisser (§8) (fraser-1921, §278). Aller + infinitive is also the near future (Il va pleuvoir) and venir de + infinitive the recent past (Il vient de partir); in UD both are full verbs with an xcomp.

Infinitives with à: aider à, apprendre à, arriver à, s'attendre à, chercher à, commencer à, consentir à, continuer à, se décider à, hésiter à, inviter à, se mettre à, parvenir à, penser à, réussir à, servir à, tenir à (fraser-1921, §279).

Infinitives with de: accepter de, s'arrêter de, cesser de, choisir de, craindre de, décider de, se dépêcher de, essayer de, éviter de, finir de, menacer de, oublier de, refuser de, regretter de, risquer de, tenter de, and the verbs with an object or a dative: dire à quelqu'un de, demander à quelqu'un de, permettre à quelqu'un de, conseiller à quelqu'un de, empêcher quelqu'un de, prier quelqu'un de (fraser-1921, §280).

Both, with a difference: commencer à / commencer de (literary), continuer à / de, s'efforcer de / à, obliger quelqu'un à / être obligé de (fraser-1921, §281).

The UD analysis. The infinitive is xcomp of the governing verb and the preposition is its mark, not a case: Il a décidé de partir: partir xcomp of décidé, de mark of partir. GSD is not fully consistent: permettre de + infinitive is xcomp 104 times and ccomp about as often; the ccomp with de (235) are mostly such infinitives. A tool that wants "the infinitive complements" must take both relations.

Negation and clitics of the infinitive. The clitics of an infinitive stand before it (Il veut le voir; chapter 21, §7.2), and ne pas stands as a block before the infinitive and its clitics (Il préfère ne pas le voir; chapter 27).

7. Control and raising

The understood subject of an infinitive complement is found in one of three ways:

Promettre is the classic exception: it has a dative but subject control (Il lui a promis de venir: he will come), against permettre with object control (Il lui a permis de venir: she may come). Raising verbs allow an impersonal construction with a finite clause (Il semble que la réponse soit oui) and keep the expletive subject of the infinitive (Il semble pleuvoir), which control verbs do not (*Il essaie de pleuvoir).

How GSD records it. UD has no enhanced graph for French (the DEPS column is empty), so the understood subject is not an arc. GSD instead puts a Subject= attribute in the MISC column of the infinitive (chapter 20, §7). Its values in GSD (2026-11-06): SubjRaising 3 892, Generic 1 543, Instantiated 736, ObjRaising 343, OblRaising 251. In the examples above reconstruire (after promis) has SubjRaising, vivre (after lui permet) OblRaising — the subject is the dative clitic — and the infinitive être after semble SubjRaising. The names cover control and raising alike: the attribute says where the subject is, not whether the main verb gives it a role.

Long passives and other traces of restructuring. With some verbs (finir de, commencer à, achever de) a passive can apply across the main verb and the infinitive together. A historical study of clitic climbing in French shows that until Middle French a clitic of the infinitive had to climb to the main verb (Je le veux voir "I want to see it"), and that climbing was lost before the 19th century; the authors argue that French kept the restructuring itself — the single clause formed by the main verb and the infinitive — and lost only most of its visible effects, keeping some such as long passives (olivier-2023). Je le veux voir is now archaic or literary, Je veux le voir the norm; with faire, laisser and the perception verbs the clitic still climbs (§8).

8. Causative and perception verbs

Causative faire. Faire + infinitive forms a single predicate: the infinitive follows faire directly, its clitics go before faire, and its subject — the person made to act, the causee — follows the infinitive:

Il fait chanter les enfants. → Il les fait chanter. he makes sing the children — "He makes the children sing."

When the infinitive has an object, the causee takes à (or par when the action is done by an agent for the causer): Il fait lire le livre aux enfants → Il le leur fait lire; Il a fait construire la maison par un architecte. With a pronoun causee of a transitive infinitive the clitic is dative (lui, leur).

fr-ud-train_03470 · UD French GSD En 1444, Guillaume d'Aubusson, compagnon d'armes de Jeanne d'Arc et seigneur du Theil, fait construire un premier sanctuaire. "In 1444 Guillaume d'Aubusson, Joan of Arc's companion in arms and lord of Le Theil, had a first sanctuary built."

The UD analysis. Faire is aux:caus and the infinitive heads the clause (chapter 20, §7). The causer, the subject of faire, is nsubj:caus of the infinitive (Guillaume above), the infinitive's own object is obj (sanctuaire), and the causee is obj:agent (a noun or accusative clitic: les enfants, les) or iobj:agent (the dative clitic). In GSD (2026-11-06) faire is aux:caus 250 times; the causative heads have 131 nsubj:caus, 122 obj, 111 obj:agent, 24 iobj:agent and 9 par-agents (obl:agent). An à-causee noun is not given a special label (it is among the obl with à).

Se faire + infinitive is a passive of experience or of action: Il s'est fait voler sa voiture "He had his car stolen", Elle se fait aider par sa sœur "She gets her sister to help her". See chapter 28.

Laisser and the perception verbs (voir, entendre, regarder, sentir, écouter) take an infinitive with its own subject in two orders: Je vois partir les enfants and Je vois les enfants partir; with a pronoun, the clitic climbs: Je les vois partir. In GSD they are not auxiliaries: the infinitive is an xcomp of voir (37), laisser (27), entendre (11), regarder (1), and the noun subject of the infinitive is an obj of the main verb or of the infinitive depending on its position. Laisser also allows the causative construction with à: Il a laissé lire la lettre à son frère. A transitive infinitive after these verbs can have a passive sense: J'ai vu bâtir cette maison "I saw this house being built" (fraser-1921, §284).

The asymmetry between faire (aux:caus, the infinitive the head) and laisser/voir (xcomp, the main verb the head) is a decision of the French UD guidelines (GSD changelog 2.1), not a difference that UD makes in other languages, and it changes the shape of the tree for constructions that French grammar treats together.

9. Predicative complements

Subject predicates after linking verbs other than être: devenir, rester, demeurer, sembler, paraître, avoir l'air, passer pour, se révéler, s'avérer. Il devient célèbre. Elle reste calme. Il passe pour un génie. In UD the predicate is xcomp of the verb (415 adjectives, 547 nouns, 186 names among the non-verbal xcomp of GSD). Only être is a copula (cop).

Object predicates after verbs of naming, choosing, judging and making: nommer, élire, appeler, croire, trouver, juger, rendre, faire: On l'a élu maire. Je le trouve gentil. Cela le rend heureux. Ils l'ont fait président. The predicate agrees with the object and is xcomp of the verb; GSD also uses xcomp with comme for considérer comme, traiter de (58 nouns with comme): On le considère comme un expert.

Bare predicate nouns take no article when they name a function or a status (élu maire, nommé ministre) and an article when they describe (Je le trouve un peu naïf, C'est un ami).

10. Missing and implicit objects

Missing objects in à-infinitives. In un livre à lire, une maison à vendre, Ce texte est facile à lire, J'ai une lettre à écrire, the object of the infinitive is missing and is the noun the phrase modifies or predicates on. An analysis of these missing-object constructions treats them as an infinitival passive: the logical object becomes the external argument, the logical subject remains available for control, and a corpus study shows that control and raising verbs can stand between à and the verb with the missing object (des problèmes à essayer de résoudre) (multner-2022). In UD the infinitive is acl of the noun or xcomp of être/the adjective, and the missing object is not represented.

Implicit objects. Some transitive verbs drop a generic or recoverable object: Il mange. Elle lit. Il boit ("he drinks", of alcohol). Spoken French drops a definite object more freely than the written language in replies: % — Tu as vu le film ? — Oui, j'ai vu. The standard keeps the clitic (Oui, je l'ai vu). The null object is not represented in UD.

11. How Mova handles it

What is done. The parser learns the complement relations from the GSD training trees (en xpos-fill, chapter 20, §12). obj, iobj, ccomp, xcomp, mark are in Mova's set; obl:arg and obl:mod fold to obl, aux:caus to aux, nsubj:caus to nsubj, obj:agent to obj, iobj:agent to iobj, obj:lvc to obj.

Traces of the parser trained on the GSD training file (en explain, 12 epochs, beam 8, CPU, 2026-11-06):

The infinitive complements are learned well, because the GSD trees for them are regular and the words (de, à + infinitive) are not affected by tokenization. The finite complement fails on two points: the elided qu' stays joined to the next word, and the subjunctive partes is unknown to the tagger, which takes its -s for a plural noun (the tagger has 84.8% accuracy on unknown words, chapter 20). The object clitics are confused with the articles that have the same form (les, la, le, l').

What is not done.

• No valency lexicon. Mova has no French lexicon of which verb takes à, de, a bare infinitive or que (§1). Without it the parser cannot tell obl:arg from obl:mod (they are folded anyway), and a de-infinitive cannot be checked against the verb.
• No control resolution. The Subject= attribute of GSD is not read and not predicted (the parser does not predict MISC), and the frames reader has no rule for subject control, object control or raising. In Il lui a permis de venir it would not know who comes.
• Causatives. The tree shape of faire + infinitive is learned, but nsubj:caus folds to nsubj and obj:agent to obj, so the causer and the causee look like an ordinary subject and object of the infinitive: a frames reader would make Guillaume the builder.
• Datives. The possessor and ethical datives are iobj like the recipient; nothing distinguishes them.

12. Sources

• Fraser, Squair & Coleman, The New Fraser and Squair Complete French Grammar (1921), §§278–284 (the infinitive without preposition, with à, with de, the infinitive for a subordinate clause, passive force after perception verbs): fraser-1921.
• Feldhausen & Buchczyk, Revisiting subjunctive obviation in French: a formal acceptability judgment study (Glossa, 2021): feldhausen-2021.
• Olivier, Sevdali & Folli, Clitic climbing and restructuring in the history of French (Glossa, 2023): olivier-2023.
• Aguila-Multner & Crysmann, French missing object constructions (Glossa, 2022): multner-2022.
• Kobayashi, Past participle agreement in French and Italian: a two-Agree analysis (Glossa, 2022): kobayashi-2022.
• UD French GSD (and its changelog), ParisStories, UD 2.18; sentences cited by sent_id; counts made with awk over the CoNLL-U files, 2026-11-06.
• Mova: en/src/main.rs (xpos_of, explain), en/src/gram.rs (Rel, base), en/src/conllu.rs (subtype fallback), prag/src/frames.rs.
• The full list is in Sources.

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