Roger Hawkins - French Grammar and Usage

fourth edition

Long trusted as the most comprehensive, up-to-date and user-friendly grammar available, French Grammar and Usage is a complete guide to French as it is written and spoken today. It includes clear descriptions of all the main grammatical phenomena of French, and their use, illustrated by numerous examples taken from contemporary French, and distinguishes the most common forms of usage, both formal and informal.

Key features include:

• comprehensive content, covering all the major structures of contemporary French
• user-friendly organisation offering easy-to-find sections with cross-referencing and indexes of English words, French words and grammatical terms
• clear and illuminating examples help students at all stages of their degree
• useful indications of what cannot be said as well as what can.

Revised and updated throughout, this new edition offers updated examples to reflect current usage, new headers to include chapter number and section parts as well as enhanced cross-referencing for easier reference and expanded and more nuanced explanations of notoriously difficult points of grammar.

The combination of reference grammar and manual of current usage is an invaluable resource for students and teachers of French at the intermediate to advanced levels.

This Grammar is accompanied by Practising French Grammar: A Workbook (available to purchase separately ISBN 978-1-138-85119-1) which features related exercises and activities and a companion website offering additional resources at www.routledge.com/cw/hawkins.

Roger Hawkins is Professor of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex, UK.

Richard Towell is Emeritus Professor of French Applied Linguistics at the University of Salford, UK.

Routledge Reference Grammars

Also available in this series:

Hammers German Grammar and Usage, Fifth Edition
A Reference Grammar of Modern Italian, Second Edition
A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish, Fifth Edition

Companion workbooks available to purchase separately:

Practising French Grammar, Fourth Edition
Practising German Grammar, Third Edition
Practising Italian Grammar
Practising Spanish Grammar, Third Edition

fourth edition

Roger Hawkins and Richard Towell

Native speaker consultant: Marie-Nolle Lamy

Companion website exercises designed by Juliet Solheim

Fourth edition published 2015
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1996, 2001, 2010, 2013, 2015 Roger Hawkins and Richard Towell

The right of Roger Hawkins and Richard Towell to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

First edition published 1996
Second edition published 2001
Third edition published 2010 by Hodder Education and 2013 by Routledge

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Hawkins, Roger (Roger D.)
French grammar and usage / Roger Hawkins and Richard Towell; Native speaker consultant: Marie-Nolle Lamy. Fourth Edition.
pages cm
1. French languageTextbooks for foreign speakersEnglish. 2. French languageGrammar. 3. French languageUsage. I. Towell, Richard, author. II. Lamy, Marie-Nolle, 1949 consultant. III. Title.
PC2129.E5H39 2015
448.2'421dc23

2014035037

ISBN: 978-1-138-85111-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-85110-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-72435-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Palatino LT by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

This reference grammar of French has been written specifically to cater for the needs of English speakers. Such grammars are seldom read like novels. Usually, readers either want information on a specific grammatical point. ('In what order do the pronouns me and le occur in imperatives?'; 'How do I translate "should" into French?'), or they want information about the behaviour of a class of grammatical phenomena such as 'pronouns', or 'modal verbs', or 'negation', and so on.

For this reason, and in common with most other grammars, French Grammar and Usage is divided into a number of chapters which deal with broad classes of grammatical phenomena; there are 17 chapters in all. But within each chap ter there are two further subdivisions: the first into particular phenomena, and the second into specific grammatical points concerning those phenomena. This gives rise to three kinds of heading in the text. For example:

The chapters and their major subdivisions are listed in the Contents at the begin ning of the book. If you want information about a broad class of grammatical phenomena, you will probably find it most quickly by looking there. At the end of the book we have provided a more detailed Index where key French and English words and expressions are listed, along with grammatical points. The items listed there will direct you to a specific section of the grammar dealing with the property you want to know about.

If you are not familiar with grammatical terms, try the Glossary of key grammatical terms , which comes just after this Guide for the user . We briefly define common terms such as subject, object, transitive verb, intransitive verb, phrase, clause, and so on, illustrating them from French.

We have focused on one variety of French: standard European French. This is the variety used by university-educated speakers throughout metropolitan France. Within this variety we have distinguished two media of communication: written French and spoken French. In the normal case, we describe grammatical phenomena which are appropriate both to the spoken and the written forms of standard European French.

But in some cases particular constructions may be appropriate either to one or the other, but not both. For example, the simple past tense form of verbs je partis I left, elle mangea she ate is normally restricted to written French. Questions formed by putting a question word at the front of a sentence without subject- verb inversion O il est, le patron? Wheres the boss? are nor mally restricted to spoken French. Where there are such restrictions we say so. Where we say nothing, assume that a construction is possible in both written and spoken French.