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This book is an advanced student's grammar of French that integrates traditional grammar with knowledge and insights from modern linguistics. Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen takes a structural approach to French grammar: she provides clear descriptions of grammatical rules based explicitly on syntactic structure, and places descriptive emphasis on instances where the grammatical structures of French differ from those used in corresponding contexts in English. The first part of the book provides an introduction to French sentence structure, before the following parts examine the grammar of verbs, nominals, particles, and clauses and sentences.
The Structure of Modern Standard French will be a valuable resource for students of French at undergraduate level and beyond. It assumes some prior knowledge of French grammar but is designed to be accessible to those with no background in linguistics.
List of contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Part I: Understanding French Sentence Structure
- 1: Simple sentences and their basic constituents
- 2: The internal structure of clause constituents
- 3: Complex sentence structures
- 4: Subordinate clauses
- Part II: The Grammar of French Verbs
- 5: Finite verb forms: Mood
- 6: Finite verb forms: Tense
- 7: Finite verb forms: Aspect
- 8: Finite verb forms: Auxiliaries
- 9: Non-finite verb forms: The infinitive
- 10: Non-finite verb forms: The past participle
- 11: 11. Non-finite verb forms: The present participle and the ^gérondif
- Part III: The Grammar of French Nominals
- 12: Definite and indefinite determiners
- 13: Adjectives within the noun phrase
- 14: Pronouns: Overview
- 15: Personal and reflexive pronouns
- 16: Neutral pronouns
- 17: Pronominal adverbs
- 18: Possessives and demonstratives
- 19: Interrogative and relative pronouns and adverbs
- 20: Indefinites
- Part IV: The Grammar of French Particles
- 21: Prepositions
- 22: Adverbs, interjections, and coordinating conjunctions
- Part V: The Grammar of French Clauses and Sentences
- 23: Negation and restriction
- 24: Word order
- 25: Voice
- 26: Dislocation, (pseudo-)clefts, and presentative constructions
- Further reading
- Appendix A: Overview of grammatical functions
- Appendix B: Word classes in French
- Appendix C: Subordinate clause types in French
- Appendix D: Examples of sentence analyses to word level
- Appendix E: Overview of the French tenses
About the author
Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen is Professor of French Language and Linguistics at the University of Manchester. She holds a PhD and Higher Doctorate in French Linguistics from the University of Copenhagen, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2013. She is the author of The Function of Discourse Particles: A Study with Special Reference to Spoken Standard French (Benjamins, 1996), and Particles at the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface: Synchronic and Diachronic Issues (Elsevier/Brill, 2008) and of numerous journal articles and book chapters in the areas of French grammar, linguistics, and pragmatics, from both a synchronic and diachronic point of view.
Summary
This book is an advanced student's grammar of French that integrates traditional grammar with knowledge and insights from modern linguistics. It assumes some prior knowledge of French grammar but is designed to be accessible to those with no background in linguistics.
Additional text
The teaching of French grammar in UK secondary and higher education has long been seen as a dreary and arbitrary enunciation of rights and wrongs. This has left many advanced learners and teachers of French starved of a deeper understanding of the principles underlying grammatical rules and of knowledge about the structure of French that linguistics provides. Mosegaard Hansen's book fills this void admirably ... as a lucid and accessible guide to understanding.
