Use of partitive article

[Curt Jugg]

In my French grammar I came across these two pairs of sentences:

La pâte à pain est agréable à toucher
Il est agréable de toucher de la pâte à pain

Le foie de veau est bon à manger
Il est bon de manger du foie de veau

Could someone please explain why the partitive article is considered necessary in the second of each pair but not in the first. Thanks.

[George Hunt]

 As a partial answer I don't think it is necessary.For example  Il est agréable de toucher  la pâte à pain also makes ( a slightly different) sense .

But maybe that is not what you are getting at.

So I  think (I am guessing) that  when you use "de" with a noun to mean "some of" it must be used in conjunction (ie just  after or very closely after) the verb in question.

 

By the way , there seems to be  some kind of  lesson involved in the examples you provided as to whether  to use à or de before the infinitive  when following an adjective such as agréable or bon .

That is not something I would be very clear about but the inference seems to be that you use à with the simple infinitive and  de when the infinitive is followed by an object noun (again I am just guessing really) .

[Curt Jugg]

Thanks for your reply, George. Yes, I wondered if there was a rule, as you suggest, requiring that the partitive article can only follow the verb. I haven't been able to find such a rule in my French grammars, though.
And you're right about the example sentences illustrating the use of either à or de with infinitives. According to my grammar, infinitives following adjectives in impersonal constructions are preceded by de and infinitives following adjectives used personally are preceded by à.

[George Hunt]

I am having difficulty imagining an impersonal/personal construction in the context of an adjective followed by an an infinitive(I don't think I came across that term before).You wouldn't have a couple of examples ,would you?

(My argument as to the order (before or after the verb) of the partitive article seems to fall down in this example I was able to find )

Il est donc très probable que d'autres travailleurs sans papier apparaissent dans ce laps de temps, et de l'argent serait donc dépensé inutilement.

Sorry I can't format the text...

[Curt Jugg]

Hi, George

According to my grammar an impersonal construction is one like this: "Il est (or c'est) difficile de formuler une politique", where il or ce don't really stand for anything. Whereas a personal construction is one like this: "Leur politique, elle est (or c'est)  difficile à accepter", where elle or ce stand for Leur politique. However, looking at my grammar again I see it's not quite as simple as I stated earlier, because although impersonal constructions do seem to take de after the adjective, personal constructions can take either à or de; it depends on the adjective. So we can have, for example: "Nous sommes prêts à accepter votre proposition" with à and "Nous sommes très heureux d'apprendre votre mariage" with de.

I'm still puzzling on the partitive article question, though, following on from the example you found.

[George Hunt]

thanks.

I get the personal/impersonal distinction now ("personal" seems to include things as as well as people).If you are right about the impersonal construction favouring "de" over "à" I would find that a useful  bit of information

Regarding the partitive article question, I now notice that my example  ("de l'argent serait donc dépensé inutilement.") isn't  an exact parallel to your first pairs of examples -since "de l'argent" isn't  followed by an adjective  which is  in turn followed by an infinitive (as is the construction in those 2 pairs of examples ).

Sorry for the confusion!

 

 

[Neil Coffey]

I think what is happening here is that the "generic" interpretation of le, la and les is more common when the sentence is itself as "generic" as possible: little time reference or reference to a specific event, little reference to an "agent" that might carry out the action. (This is why if I say Le vin m'empêchait de dormir, I am probably referring to "wine in general", because no specific event is implied, just "in the past generally", whereas if I say Le vin m'a empêché de dormir, I am referring to a specific wine, as in using the passé composé I am hinting at a specific occasion.)

In your second sentences of the pair, you subtly introduce more of a reference to an "agent" that might carry out the action. For example, if I say:

Il est bon de se/nous souvenir que...

you might ask the question: "who" does the 'se'/'nous' actually "agree" with? Probably not actually "il", given at least that "nous" is possible. In other words, although not expressed in words, in the construction "Il est bon de..." we are subtly "imagining" an agent carrying out the action-- or put another way, the observation we are making is not actually "quite as generic" as in the first sentence in each pair.

[Curt Jugg]

Thanks, Neil. A very subtle distinction! Having said that, would "De la pâte à pain est agréable à toucher" and "Il est agréable de toucher  la pâte à pain" still be acceptable French sentences?

[George Hunt]

Was that a misprint Curt? Did you mean to  write

 

Thanks, Neil. A very subtle distinction! Having said that, would "De la pâte à pain est agréable à toucher" and "Il est agréable de toucher    de     la pâte à pain" still be acceptable French sentences?

                                                                                                                                                            ?

[Curt Jugg]

No, George. I was just seeking confirmation that the alternative without de was also idiomatic.

[George Hunt]

In that case "De la pâte à pain est agréable à toucher" does sound very strange to me  whereas "Il est agréable de toucher  la pâte à pain" sounds perfectly in order.(maybe Neil  sees it differently)

[Curt Jugg]

I've been doing some research on this subject and I've discovered that partitive articles can in fact begin sentences, though not all that frequently it seems. As my earlier examples happened to feature dough, I had a look at the French Wikipedia article on Pain and found this sentence: "De la pâte à pain sans levain (eau, lait et farine d'orge et de millet) aurait été oubliée, se serait «gâtée», mais aurait tout de même été cuite, menant ainsi à la découverte du pain avec levain que les Égyptiens enrichirent parfois de graisse, d'œufs ou de miel." As another example, googling (with inverted commas) "le café est servi" brings up 258,000 hits but googling "du café est servi" brings up 260,000. I also had a look in Le bon usage (14th edition) and found the following at 582 N.B.2: "Quoi que disent certains linguistes, l'art. partitif sing. peut accompagner un sujet précédant le verbe". It goes on to quote Flaubert (amongst others): "De la buée s'en élevait." There seems to be an implication here that some linguists think it's wrong to begin a sentence with a singular partitive article and perhaps that's why it's not very common in that position.

[George Hunt]

That was  pretty determined of you to come up with those examples.

I have to admit that I had given up. The only explanation that comes to my mind as to why these examples work (whereas mine seemed not to ) is that the first of your examples  places the phrase containing the partitive article at the beginning of  a series of phrasesand clauses (is that the right grammatic term?) and so the structure of the overall sentence is  quite complicated.

The second set of examples  is very simple and  is basically just noun +verb (+ maybe an adjective or an adverb).

I doubt I am right  but that is all I can suggest.