Avoir or être

[David Weale]

Michel Thomas in his French course compares the conjugation of verbs with être to King James' bible phraseology such as "He is gone unto" wherever. This gave me a perspective that had evaded me in school French lessons.

I recall being taught that verbs expressing movement used être. My BBC French Experience, many years later, made it clearer that être is used with verbs expressing either movement or a change of state. But it still took Michel Thomas to lead me to what I think is a better understanding - that we are concerned with intransitive verbs expressing simply a change of state; forget about movement - plus some associated thoughts on the matter that I need to get off my chest . . .

English country yokels characteristically say such things as " 'e be gone to the pub, oh arr", suggesting that the use of 'être' may have been the norm in the English of King James' time and earlier; ie, the English that emerged from Norman French and Anglo Saxon.

However, it seems that we decided subsequently to regularize our grammar with the result that all English verbs, transitive or otherwise, came to be conjugated exclusively with 'avoir' - "he has died" and "he has killed" both expressing past acts - with an added refinement, denied to the French, of being able to express perceptions (as distinct from acts or changes of state) such as "he is dead", where "dead" (a new word, distinguishable from "died") was an adjective rather than a past participle.

This begs the question of how French and English grammarians of those early days dealt with the matter; whether "il est mort" was a conjugation of "mourir" or of être, with "mort" being an adjective. Is it possible that, out of respect for their patrimoine, a French regularisation was restricted to decreeing the first option to be true, at the expense of consistency?

Be that as it may, I find the orthodox rule easier to understand by thinking of it in King James' bible English; eg, "he is gone", "he is died", "he is become", etc, where all are expressing changes of state. 

The only fly in the ointment is the use of être with reflexive verbs . . . Or is it?

Perhaps someone can tell me where am I going wrong?

[Neil Coffey]

You're not going wrong as such. What is happening is that strictly speaking is that:

• there appears to be a category of verbs called unaccusative verbs;
• one property of such verbs is that in French (and some other languages), they tend to select être rather than avoir;
• they also have other properties, which are still shared by English and other languages with only one auxiliary.

Notice that in English, there are certain verbs that you can use with the subject and verb inverted, and a prepositional phrase or a dummy word like "There" in subject position:

 

There remained three people in the room.

In the pub sat a number of bearded locals.

There emerged a series of problems.

At that moment came the news he'd been waiting for.

 

But on the other hand, you probably wouldn't say as readily:

 

* There worked three people in the room.

* In the pub drank a number of bearded locals.

??At that moment broke the news he'd been waiting for.

 

Simiarly, notice how there are a few verbs whose past participles are active and can be used a bit more like "normal" adjectives:

 

He is a fallen hero.

The train just arrived at platform 3 is the 4:34 to Glasgow.

Our departed leader will be sorely missed. (="Our leader who has departed")

 

Contrast these with:

 

He is a fought hero. (Impies he was fought, passive, not that he did the fighting.)

!The man just worked at platform 3 is a railway engineer.

??Our resigned leader.

 

In French, unaccusative verbs (broadly, être verbs) tend to have these properties too. So French speakers would be much more likely to say:

 

Il reste trois personnes.

Le train parti de la gare il y a quelques moments...

Sa femme, morte hier d'un cancer pulmonaire...

 

than:

 

?? Il travaille trois personnes.

* L'enfant mangé une glace il y a quelques minutes...

* Sa femme, souffert(e) hier d'une attaque cardiaque...

 

So broadly, we can say that in English, unaccusative verbs used to select "be" (generally, not just in the bible!), but that "be" has now been ousted by "have", whereas in French, the distinction remains.

 

The situation is actually a bit more complicated than this: different languages that have "have"/"be" selection actually differ in which verbs select which auxiliary (in Italian there are a good hundred or more verbs that select "essere", compared to 20-30 verbs in French that select "être"). And even within the same language, not all speakers use the same auxiliary all of the time (among other less common ones, "apparaître", "passer" and "monter" differ among French speakers, and depending on the meaning, for example). Even in French (and other Romance languages), auxiliary selection has varied over time, so that verbs such as "aller", "sortir", "partir" could at one time select "avoir" to indicate a more "deliberate" action on behalf of the subject.

 

Another complication is that more generally you will find the use of verbs that don't have all of the features of unaccusative verbs, but still have some of them. For example in French, you actually will occasionally find sentences such as: "Il travaille des milliers d'ouvriers dans cette usine" or "Il a éternué beaucoup d'enfants pendant le concert" (examples cited in the paper I mention below).

 

Anyone more interested in the technicalities of this may like to look at a paper entitled "Auxiliaries and Intransitivity in French and in Romance", which appears as Chapter 5 of "Fundamental Issues in the Romance Languages", (2010), ed. D Godard.

[David Weale]

Gulp!

 

Thanks very much for your prompt response.

 

I need some time to digest it all . . .

[Neil Coffey]

 

 

I just wanted to emphasise something in response partly to your reply and partly to another message I received privately: the above is something of an "academic" explanation of the esssnce of être verbs.

 

For the practical purpose of learning basic French, you may as well just memorise the list of common verbs that take être: there are something in the order of 20-30 common verbs in total. (In Italian, German, Dutch etc where there are more "be" verbs, there may be more merit in applying criteria such as the above than just memorising.)

 

What I wrote above, I consider to be within the domain of an interesting theoretical discussion, but of little practical use in teaching the basics of French. I didn't mean it to be taken as such.

[David Weale]

Please don't worry on my count. I like to get to the bottom of things.

 

In addition, I have an unreliable memory. Maybe as a consequence, I have a need to 'feel' what I am saying is right; that it's got some underlying validity. My King James' test seems to do the trick.

 

 

 

 

[Neil Coffey]

Yes, getting a feel for what a phenomenon is is definitely worthwhile!

 

Incidentally, it is just worth being aware (and I essentially hintd at this in my post above) that there isn't a strict relationship between which precise verbs allowed "be" in Middle English, and which verbs now allow être in Modern French.

 

The situation in Middle English appears to have been more similar to German, Italian etc today, where a fairly wide range of verbs at one time allowed "be" (so not just "go", "come" but other verbs like "wander"). Of common languages with the phenomenon today, French actually seems a bit unusal in that the number of être verbs is quite small.