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Inverted French verbs | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 17 of 24 10 May 2012 at 6:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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As I read other posters claim that inversion occurs in sentences that are not questions, I can't disagree, but I have to interject that we are talking about different things and that I can't see the OP's example as anything but a question.
Unless another native speakers explains that they disagree with me, I don't want the OP to assume that the inversion in his sentence is simply a literary trick. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6086 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 18 of 24 10 May 2012 at 8:35pm | IP Logged | ||
Found it! :) The sentence from the first post was missing the "perhaps/peut-être", Décidément, nos amis Laurent et Anne-Marie n'ont pas de chance ! Ou peut-être Laurent aime-t-il se plaindre. After flipping through, here's two other examples from the same book. Peut-être y a-t-il des indices que vous avez négligés. Perhaps there are other clues which you have overlooked. Vois-tu, lui passait ses journées à peindre.. Can someone expand on this one? (there's no "perhaps") Is this another similarity to German? It's quite natural to say "siehst du,..." in German. How common is this for French? Edited by Sunja on 10 May 2012 at 8:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 19 of 24 10 May 2012 at 8:56pm | IP Logged | ||
This is just a common saying... not really a grammatical feature. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6086 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 20 of 24 10 May 2012 at 9:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks! I'm glad I came across this thread^^ Iversen mentioned "aussi" and "ainsi" and after going after that I found this nice list of "signal words"
à peine, ainsi, aussi, du moins, en vain, encore, non seulement, peut-être, sans doute, toujours So if you use these words with commas there's no inversion?? edit: Or is that only with "aussi" (I guess I need to spend some more time with these liaisons!) en vain, j'essaiais de descendre silencieusement l'escalier. en vain essaiais-je de descendre silencieusement l'escalier. I'm probably far from using this correctly but if I understand it I can recognize it more often when I read! Edited by Sunja on 10 May 2012 at 9:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4890 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 21 of 24 10 May 2012 at 9:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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I heard the construction again last night, in the second episode of Game of Thrones.
I think Iversen has it right, that it's some type of exclamation. Here are some other examples from Lesson 41: Le ministre, a-t-il dit, a voulu dorer la pilule en anonçant de nouvelles indemnités. (The minister, he said, wanted to gild the lily by announcing new benefits) Ses remarques, semble-t-il, ont fait mouche car c'est le ministre du Budget lui-même qui, étonné, a répondu: (It would seem that his remarks hit home because it was the minister of the Budget himself, who replied in a rather astonished way ...) - These are similar to what I heard on Game of Thrones; the character was narrating a story and used dit-elle for "she said" rather than elle dit. @ Sunja - that list of trigger words is great. I don't think I've seen this before. It explains another example in Assimil, where they use toujours est-il que as an 'elegant' (their word) way to say en tout cas. Edited by kanewai on 10 May 2012 at 9:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 22 of 24 10 May 2012 at 9:54pm | IP Logged | ||
All these examples are either from narration (dit-il, pense-t-il, etc.) or it's inversion with a head word. It has nothing to do with the example in your opening thread... Edited by Arekkusu on 10 May 2012 at 9:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 23 of 24 11 May 2012 at 1:31am | IP Logged | ||
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I was sure that I had seen exclamations both with and without an interrogative, bot otherwise of the same form as questions, and now I have returned from the long and ardous pilgrimage to my dusty collection of French grammars where I expected to find confirmation of this claim. And I found it in that cherised hallow of Gallic scholarship, Maurice Grevisse's Le Bon usage, 9. édition § 186:
"Dans les propositions exclamatives non introduites par un adverbe ou par un adjectif exclamatif, si le sujet est un pronom personnel ou ce ou on: Est-il aimable! L'ai-je assez dit!. Remarques: - 1. Dans ces propositions, si le sujet n'est ni un pronom personnel, ni ce ou on, il se place devant le verbe, et se répète obligatoirement après le verbe par un pronom personnel: Cet enfant est-il aimable!. (...)" Well, there you have the construction in "Laurent aime-t-il se plaindre" in a nutshell - and, yes I saw that there has been a misquotation in this case, but that doesn't change that the construction would have been correct according to Monsieur Grevisse. However not everything condoned by him is something you should emulate in ordinary French prose and even less in the spoken language. You wouldn't want to walk away from this discussion speaking like a novel written by André Gide ou Fr. Mauriac. The constructions with "à peine", "ainsi", "aussi" and inversions etc. are treated in Grevisse § 187, and at least some of these constructions are still common in written French. Edited by Iversen on 11 May 2012 at 1:37am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4890 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 24 of 24 12 May 2012 at 7:59pm | IP Logged | ||
I'm still struggling a bit with this one. I understand your explanation, but can't quite tell when a phrase like "she asked" in your example would be a descriptive clause, and when it would be a regular subject-verb clause. Is there a pattern, or is it mostly a matter of literary style? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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