Study guide: French Grammatical Classes and Syntax

📋 Course Outline

1. Noun Properties and Subcategories
2. Adjective Morphology and Syntax
3. Noun Determination and Animacy
4. Verb Inflection and Functions
5. Pronoun Syntactic Behaviors
6. Syntactic Phrase Types
7. Labeled Bracketing and Constituents
8. Constituency Tests
9. Defining the Sentence

📖 1. Noun Properties and Subcategories

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Noun: a grammatical category that can designate beings, objects, properties, states, feelings, or processes
• Collective Noun: a collection or group made up of several things and combines properties of countable and mass nouns

★ Must-know

📌 Countable nouns designate discontinuous elements of reality, whereas mass nouns designate continuous substances such as water.

Further detail

• Only a small number of nouns alternate in form according to gender, as in chat/chatte and président/présidente.

💡 Memory Hook

Countable nouns mark separate units, whereas mass nouns denote continuous substances.

📖 2. Adjective Morphology and Syntax

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Adjective: traditionally a category that can vary in gender and number, although its syntactic properties are not all specific to adjectives or shared by all adjectives

★ Must-know

📌 A qualifying adjective can generally express degrees, whereas a relational or pseudo-adjective such as fiscal in contrôle fiscal excludes degree modification.

Further detail

📌 A relational adjective is normally restricted to postposed epithet position and cannot ordinarily be a detached epithet or an attribute.

• The adjective admits the context c’est…, as in C’est beau and C’est magnifique, but this context is also available to proper nouns such as Maria and Rome.

💡 Memory Hook

Qualifying adjectives can be graded, whereas relational adjectives generally cannot.

📖 3. Noun Determination and Animacy

★ Must-know

📌 Animacy affects pronominalization: qui is associated with animate or human referents, whereas que and quoi are associated with inanimate or uncategorized referents.

📌 A noun is commonly susceptible to being preceded by a determiner, but the determiner may be separated from it by modifiers or omitted through ellipsis.

Further detail

📌 In je mange du bon pain chaud et croustillant, du actualizes pain, determines it semantically, marks its number morphologically, and receives its gender morphologically from pain.

• A noun can serve as the antecedent of a relative pronoun, as voiture does in une nouvelle voiture qui lui a coûté les yeux de la tête.

💡 Memory Hook

Picture the noun pain held between the determiner du and its modifiers.

📖 4. Verb Inflection and Functions

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Verb: the only lexeme category that inflects for mood, tense, number, and person

★ Must-know

📌 Tense locates a process in the present, past, or future relative to the point of utterance, whereas aspect presents the process through its internal development.

📌 The verb agrees in number with the subject noun phrase and takes its person category from that subject.

Further detail

📌 Personal moods distinguish persons through specific endings, whereas impersonal moods such as the infinitive and participle do not have endings distinguishing persons.

📌 In elle est fatigante, fatigante is a verbal adjective, whereas in ses yeux fatiguant, elle s’est arrêtée, fatiguant is a present participle.

💡 Memory Hook

Person, number, tense, aspect, then mood.

📖 5. Pronoun Syntactic Behaviors

★ Must-know

• Pronouns show three syntactic behaviors:
  • replace a noun phrase
  • function as clitics without occupying its place
  • link two clauses as subordinating pronouns

📌 Definite pronouns can substitute for a determiner-plus-noun sequence, a noun with modifiers, or an adjective.

Further detail

• Personal pronouns such as je and tu do not necessarily replace a noun phrase because they directly designate their referents.

💡 Memory Hook

A substituting pronoun replaces a noun phrase, whereas a clitic need not occupy its place.

📖 6. Syntactic Phrase Types

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Syntactic Phrase: a sequence of words that behaves like a single word in certain tests and can commute with a single word

📝 Essential Points

• The main phrase types are headed as follows:
  • noun phrase by a noun or pronoun
  • verb phrase by a verb
  • adjective phrase by an adjective
  • adverbial phrase by an adverb
  • prepositional phrase by a preposition

💡 Memory Hook

GN, GV, GA, GAdv, GP: each phrase is headed by its defining category.

📖 7. Labeled Bracketing and Constituents

📝 Essential Points

• Immediate-constituent analysis decomposes a syntactic unit into its largest constituents and then repeats the analysis successively inside those constituents.

💡 Memory Hook

Decompose the largest constituents first, then repeat inside them.

📖 8. Constituency Tests

★ Must-know

• The main constituency tests are:
  • substitution
  • deletion
  • addition
  • movement
  • cliticization
  • clefting
  • questioning

Further detail

📌 A sequence that can be coordinated with another sequence by et has the status of a syntactic phrase, as in un fromage et un dessert.

• Cliticization can replace a prepositional phrase: des émissaires du gouvernement brésilien sont arrivés à Londres becomes des émissaires du gouvernement brésilien y sont arrivés.

💡 Memory Hook

Substitute, delete or add, move, cliticize, cleft, then question.

📖 9. Defining the Sentence

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Sentence: A sentence cannot be characterized solely as a sequence beginning with a capital letter and ending with a full stop, or as an expression with a complete meaning.

📝 Essential Points

• Some perfectly interpretable sequences, such as Moi vouloir toi, may be refused sentence status, while some formally punctuated sequences may be incomprehensible.

• Chomsky's examples *Lire-vous un livre sur la musique moderne ? and *Cet enfant paraît dormant illustrate sequences rejected as grammatical sentences despite being interpretable. — Syntactic Structures, 1969

💡 Memory Hook

Punctuation and interpretable meaning are associated with sentences, but neither defines them alone.

📊 Synthesis Tables

Noun Subcategories

Category	Meaning	Example or behavior
Countable	Discontinuous elements	souris, lampe, voiture
Mass	Continuous substances	eau
Collective	Collections or groups	bouquet, équipe, famille, comité