Giáo trình động từ tiếng Pháp - Part III Taking a Look Back: The Past Tenses - Chapter 14 doc

Chapter 14

Deciphering the Literary Tenses:

The Passé Simple and

Passé Antérieur

In This Chapter

Conjugating the passé simple

Forming the passé antérieur

French has some tenses that are reserved for writing only. The passé simple and the

passé antérieur, or past anterior, are two such tenses. You only need to recognize them

in case you ever curl up with your favorite French novel or short story.

The passé simple is a literary tense that expresses a completed action in the past. In fact, it

has the same meaning as the passé composé, which is a compound tense. Meanwhile, the

passé antérieur is the past of the passé simple. You use it when one action in the past has to

happen before another action takes place in the past. This chapter does have a short sec￾tion on it just so that you can identify it when you see it.

Because they’re both literary tenses, you don’t use them in everyday conversation. This

chapter briefly looks at the passé simple and passé antérieur and helps you identify and

conjugate them in case you do encounter them.

Creating the Passé Simple

As the name indicates, the passé simple is a simple verb, which means that the verb is

conjugated by itself without an auxiliary. If you have never seen the passé simple before, it

can seem very odd (especially the plural endings). This section helps you recognize it. And

don’t worry about using it too much in your own writing. You can use the passé composé

instead to express a completed action in the past. Check out Chapter 13 for more on the

passé composé. This section shows you how to conjugate the passé simple for regular and

irregular verbs.

Regular verbs

The passé simple of regular verbs is fairly easy to form. Just drop the -er, -ir, and -re of the

infinitives and add the endings. However, -er verbs have different endings than -ir and -re

verbs. The following charts show you the different endings.

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