4.12 Reflexive verbs — the daily routine — Epoché
What you will be able to do Conjugate a verb that carries a pronoun of its own, through all six persons of the present tense. Tell the reflexive use from the reciprocal use, which share the same forms and are separated only by sense. Use the two dozen of these verbs that describe an ordinary day, including the several whose English counterparts have no reflexive pronoun at all. Say what English does instead, and why the pronoun looks redundant to an English speaker while being obligatory in French. Sentences from this lesson, before the explanation. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English Je m'appelle Ahmad. [1] My name is Ahmad. Elle s'appelle Irina. [2] Her name's Irina. Comment vous appelez-vous ? [3] What is your name? Prerequisites : 4.9, 3.3 — you need the object pronouns and their position (4.9), because the pronoun in these verbs is one of them, and you need the present tense of the first group of verbs (3.3). See 4.9 Grammar and 3.3 Conjugation if you need them. A large family of French verbs comes with a pronoun permanently attached. The pronoun changes with the subject, sits in front of the verb like any object pronoun, and cannot be left out. In the dictionary these verbs are listed with the third person form of that pronoun in front of the infinitive, which is how you recognise one before you have ever seen it conjugated. English has this construction too, and uses it far less. She washed herself , he hurt himself : the pronoun is there and it means something, namely that the action came back on the person who performed it. French uses the same construction for that purpose and for three or four others besides, and in most of those others the pronoun means nothing translatable at all. That is the whole difficulty. When the pronoun is doing the job English would do with a word ending in -self , you will remember it. When it is not — and most of the time it is not — nothing in your English prompts you, and the verb comes out bare and wrong. The two dozen verbs in this lesson are the ones worth learning as whole units, pronoun included, so that the question never arises. How English does it English reflexive pronouns are heavy words; French ones are light. Myself , yourself , ourselves are two syllables each, and they carry emphasis. The French pronouns are one syllable each, unstressed, and belong to the same set you learned as object pronouns. Because the English words are heavy, English uses them sparingly and only when the meaning demands them. Because the French ones are light, French can afford to use them everywhere. English often expresses the same idea with an intransitive verb; French uses the pronoun. I get up , I wake up , I go to bed : no reflexive pronoun anywhere, and no sense that anything is missing. French needs the pronoun in all three, because the bare verbs mean to raise something, to wake somebody and to put somebody to bed. The pronoun is what turns an action performed on something else into an action performed on yourself. English says what somebody is called with a passive; French says it with one of these verbs. My name is , or I am called : one is a noun phrase and the other a passive. French uses a verb meaning to call, with the pronoun, so that the literal sense is that you call yourself something. This is the first of these verbs anybody learns and it is also the one whose structure is least like English. English marks reciprocity with a separate phrase; French leaves it to context. Each other and one another are explicit in English. In French the plural forms of these verbs do reciprocal duty with no extra word, so the same three words can mean that two people love themselves or that they love each other. Context settles it, and in practice the reciprocal reading is usually the obvious one. English keeps the reflexive pronoun after the verb; French puts it before, except in one case. The pronoun follows the rules you learned for object pronouns exactly: in front of the verb normally, inside the negative bracket, and behind the verb with a hyphen in an affirmative command. That last case is the only one that resembles English, and it is also where the pronoun changes to a stressed form. The pronoun and the conjugation Six subjects, but only five different pronouns. Four of them you already know from the lesson on object pronouns; only the third person form is new, and it serves for both singular and plural. Subject Its pronoun first person singular me — shortens to a single letter before a vowel second person singular, familiar te — likewise shortens before a vowel third person singular se — the new form; likewise shortens first person plural nous — identical to the subject pronoun, so the word appears twice second person plural or polite vous — likewise identical, so the word appears twice third person plural se — the same form as the singular, with no plural marking at all The two plural rows are the ones that look strange on the page. The subject pronoun and the object pronoun are the same word, so a sentence has the same short word twice in a row, and beginners assume they have made a mistake. They have not: one is the subject and one is the object, and both are required. Here is one verb through all six persons, with a stem change you met in the lesson on spelling changes. The pronoun is the first word after the subject in every line. French English je me lève I get up tu te lèves you get up il se lève he gets up nous nous levons we get up vous vous levez you get up ils se lèvent they get up Read the English column and notice that no line contains a word ending in -self . Six French sentences with a pronoun, six English sentences without one. This is the pattern for most of the family, and it is why the pronoun has to be learned as part of the verb rather than derived from the meaning. The forms in this table were written for this lesson as a paradigm; the sentences below are from the corpus. Twenty-four verbs for an