Talk:French verbs

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[edit] Conditional mood (vs tense)

Is there really a controversy among linguists about this? I don't think anyone would deny that there is a conditional mood in French (or any language), and the term "conditional tense" doesn't make much sense. If the idea is that a verb chooses one thing from the "mood" list and one thing from the "tense" list, then the conditional is in the wrong list right now. CapnPrep 12:26, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

I absolutely agree with CapnPrep: a conditional tense? I don't have the French grammar books to look this up in, but it certainly doesn't fit the English definition of 'conditional' or 'tense'. Glancing at the French grammar pages on Wikipedia, they need serious rescue work. Internal contradictions... ugh. Njál 00:21, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
I feel like I already responded to this, but I don't see my comment anywhere, so I guess I never actually submitted the edit. At any rate, if we ignore the whole issue with compound tenses (a.k.a. the perfect aspect), then there are two ways to look at things:
  1. French has three finite moods: an indicative (which has five tenses — present, past/preterite, imperfect, future, and conditional), a subjunctive (which has two tenses — present and imperfect), and an imperative (which only has a present tense).
  2. French has four finite moods: an indicative (which has four tenses — present, past/preterite, imperfect, and future), a subjunctive (which has two tenses — present and imperfect), a conditional (which only has a present tense), and an imperative (ditto).
That is, either the conditional can be considered a tense of the indicative, or it can be considered its own mood, with just one tense. Both viewpoints make sense the way the conditional is used. The conditional has purely temporal uses — « Je savais déjà ce qu'il arriverait le lendemain » but also purely modal ones — « Si je savais quoi faire, je le ferais ». (I think it also has blended uses, where it's partly temporal and partly modal, but I'm having difficulty formulating a plausible example.) And for that matter, the same can be said of some of the other tenses; for example, the future tense can be used to describe a future certainty (temporal use) or to describe an existing tendency (modal use), or for a few other things. (BTW, all this is equally true in English.)
But to answer your real question, "Is there really a controversy among linguists about this?", I'd have to say yes, and cite Bescherelle's La Conjugaison pour tous (ISBN 2-218-71716-6), paragraph 100, which says in part, « Le conditionnel, longtemps considéré comme un mode spécifique, est aujourd'hui rattaché à l'indicatif, pour des raisons de forme et de sens ». (Actually, I guess that's not a great source for saying there's an existing controversy, since it rather makes it sound like now everyone agrees that the conditional is better classified as a tense; but I gather that I don't need to convince you that some classify it as a mood.)
Ruakh 01:34, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

I guess I understand that position. But then why not say that the imperative is also a tense that is also only used in the indicative mood (pour des raisons de forme) or only in the subjunctive mood (pour des raisons de sens)? Then we could get get rid of another mood! Yes, from a pedagogical point of view (e.g., the Bescherelle), it's nice to put the conditional and the future together somehow (same stem and similar endings). Calling them both tenses of the indicative doesn't really achieve this (the indicative is notoriously non-uniform in stems and endings). And anyway this article isn't about conjugation, so maybe we don't care about making sense of the actual forms. As Ruakh's comment suggests, this is mostly a question of terminology. And (for better or for worse) we are stuck with the traditional terminology, and traditionally, "conditional" is a modal notion (and "conditional tense" would be quite un-traditional). Why not keep in harmony with tradition (and with the conventional treatment of similar issues in other languages) if this does no violence to the French analysis? Is the conditional tense approach actually better?

One argument against the idea of adding "conditional" to the set of indicative tenses "present, preterite, imperfect, future" is that these 4 tenses can all be used in independent clauses without triggering any additional modal effect. (As Ruakh notes, the future can express probability or something like that, but it can also just express a simple temporal relation.) This is not true of the conditional in an independent clause, like "Je viendrais". This can only have the modal-conditional interpretation and never the future-in-the-past temporal interpretation. E.g. "Hier j'ai dit que je viendrais" but *"Hier je viendrais". If the temporal use is only possible in a particular syntactic configuration, I think it's hard to maintain that the conditional is fundamentally a tense. The basic interpretation of the conditional is, apparently, conditional. CapnPrep 03:36, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

I disagree with your assessment. The imperative and subjunctive are taken as separate moods because they always act modally, never temporally (though sometimes there's kind of a null modality, as in « Je suis heureux que tu sois venu » and « […] le fait qu'il ait dit cela […] »). And the reason Bescherelle mentions form is not pedagogical organization, but rather that even in the conditional's modal uses, it makes semantic sense to regard the conditional as a blend of the future and the imperfect, which is indeed how it's formed in French. (Well, that's Bescherelle's claim, at any rate; I'm not sure I completely agree with it, but then, I'm not sure I'm really qualified to discard it, either.)
Further, the conditional can have either sense in an independent clause; it depends on context. (Either use requires some set-up — the temporal use requires a past-tense jumping-off point, and the modal use requires an expressed or implied condition — but in neither case is there a need for the conditional to be in a clause subordinate to an independent set-up clause. The problem with *« Hier je viendrais » is not that it's using a temporal conditional in a subordinate clause, but rather that it's using a temporal conditional with an adverb that's defined relative to the present; « Je viendrais le lendemain » is perfectly acceptable, assuming there's context for it.)
That said, I really don't object to listing the conditional as its own mood, provided we have a note that says some grammarians classify it as a tense of the indicative, etc., etc.
Ruakh 15:14, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't feel that strongly about what goes in the article, either (I find the talk page more interesting). I asked some French speakers about this data and they seemed to agree with me, but now I think the 1st person pronoun in the examples was stacking the deck in my favor. I think you're right, you can get main-clause futur-du-passé readings with the conditional in reported speech or "narrative" contexts: "Il était déjà dans le train. Il prendrait le premier avion et il surprendrait tout le monde." I wonder whether this really counts as an "indicative" context, though (it looks like the use of Konjunktiv across sentences in German newspaper texts).
I think one solution for the article (to get back on topic) is to use the French term "conditionnel" to refer to the form in the conjugation table. Looking at it this way, the question of deciding whether the conditionnel is a tense or a mood is completely meaningless (it's obviously neither). Then we say that the conditionnel is used in "conditional" (mood) contexts, and also to express "future-in-the-past" tense (I am still totally against any notion of "conditional tense"). CapnPrep 09:53, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Unclear: aie-le fait

The article currently translates "aie-le fait" (perfect imperative) as "have it done", but this explanation is not very clear to me. Can someone give a more fleshed out explanation of what situation you would use this in and what would be a longer translation in English? Thanks. Gronky 17:42, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

« Aie-le fait avant […] » means "Do it before […]", but whereas French can use either the neutral or the perfect aspect for such a situation (the preceding being the perfect-aspect version, the neutral-aspect version being « Fais-le avant […] »), English generally only uses the neutral aspect, the perfect aspect construction ?"Have done it before […]" being exceedingly rare. However, English does often use a construction that's similar to the French, both superficially and semantically: "Have it done before […]". (The French translation of this would actually be « Fais-le faire avant […] ».) So, that point in the article isn't really well covered, but I don't know how to explain it better without giving the present perfect imperative way more space than it warrants, seeing as it's a fairly rare construction in French. —RuakhTALK 03:42, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Venir de

This article should mention the phrase "venir de". Utterly ignorant about the proper grammatical terminology to use, I won't include it myself. And yes, this phrase isn't presented as a tense in textbooks, but it's used like one -- to express an action that took place just before another one. (Il venait de ranger la vaisselle lorsqu'elle est entrée dans la pièce). It's a greater degree of temporal precision than what one has in "Il a rangé [rangea] la vaisselle avant quelle n'entre [entrât] dans la pièce). --Zantastik talk 21:55, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

-- the "venir de" construction is called "passé recent" S7even

[edit] Temporal auxiliary verbs

I think this part of the discussion must be transferred to or fully integrated with the Passé composé article. S7even