French Grammar and Usage

French Grammar and Usage book cover

Long trusted as the most comprehensive, up-to-date and user-friendly grammar available, French Grammar and Usage is a complete guide to French as it is written and spoken today. It includes clear descriptions of all the main grammatical phenomena of French, and their use, illustrated by numerous examples taken from contemporary French, and distinguishes the most common forms of usage, both formal and informal.

Key features include:

Revised and updated throughout, this new edition offers updated examples to reflect current usage, new headers to include chapter number and section parts as well as enhanced cross-referencing for easier reference and expanded and more nuanced explanations of notoriously difficult points of grammar.

The combination of reference grammar and manual of current usage is an invaluable resource for students and teachers of French at the intermediate to advanced levels.

This Grammar is accompanied by the Practising French Grammar: A Workbook (available to purchase seaparately ISBN 978-1-13-885119-1) which features related exercises and activities and a companion website offering additional resources at www.routledge.com/cw/hawkins .

Table of Contents

1. Nouns 2. Determiners 3. Personal and impersonal pronouns 4. Adjectives 5. Adverbs 6. Numbers 7. Verb forms 8. Verb constructions 9. Agreement 10. Tense 11. The subjunctive, modal verbs and exclamatives 12. Infinitives 13. Prepositions 14. Questions 15. Relative clauses 16. Negation 17. Conjugations and other linking constructions

Author(s)

Biography

Roger Hawkins is Professor of Langauge and Linguistics at the University of Essex, UK

Richard Towell is Emeritus Professor of French Applied Linguistics at the Salford University, UK

Critics' Reviews

"This is an excellent resource, with very clear explanations that strike the right balance between the right levels of accessibility, detail and accuracy. " Christophe Gagne, University of Cambridge, UK

"Comprehensive, easily navigable and the explanations cover all the important aspects of the grammar points on our syllabus without being excessively complex. The complementary Practising French Grammar provides students with a range of very well-devised and varied exercises to practise what they have studied in French Grammar and Usage." Marie Fournier, University College London, UK

" The scope and sequence are excellent as are the topics covered. French Grammar and Usage is complete without being obsessed with minor details or insignificant minutiae." Heather McCoy, The Pennsylvania State University, USA

"An excellent, detailed reference grammar. A wealth of example sentences makes detailed explanations clearer. The translations are reliable and help to clarify the meaning (and nuances) of the French example sentences." Gabor Gelleri, Aberystwyth University, UK