Lanterna Rally

Author: Edward C. Armstrong

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2015-06-25

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 9781330382677

Excerpt from Syntax of the French Verb The present work, while by no means a complete treatment of the syntax of the French verb, is intended to be sufficiently comprehensive to serve students of French as a reference book. At the same time, an effort has been made to arrange the material in such a way that it can be used to advantage in class, especially in connection with exercises in French composition. The aim of the book is to record only contemporary French usage; that is, to include only such statements as can be verified for good written or spoken French of the last fifty years. Any one familiar with grammatical treatises will know how rarely such a purpose is attained, and it is to be feared that, in spite of the care exercised, archaic constructions may have slipped into the treatment. Since the book should serve the double purpose of an explanation of literary construction and of an aid in using colloquial French, some material of both classes is included; but, for the most important cases of deviation in the two styles, there exists the intention of indicating to which style a given statement applies. When practicable, illustrative sentences have been chosen which are good in either style. No effort has been made to limit the illustrative examples to citations from French authors. The governing principle has been to make the sentence structure and the vocabulary as simple as possible, and to court rather than to taboo repetition; the aim being to distract the student's attention as little as possible from the principle illustrated. Where practicable, this is further sought for by spacing the letters of the French word or phrase that illustrates the rule. To increase the practical utility of the book, material has sometimes been included that, strictly speaking, is not syntactical; and, for the same reason, the classification of material is not always rigorously accurate; for example, participial forms of the verb with purely adjectival functions are treated here instead of being relegated to a work on the adjective. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.