Le/ La/ Les: Please help with French pronouns?

Could you explain to me why the following direct pronouns are placed where they are?:

a) Elle vas faire ses devoirs. ---> Elle vas les faire.

[Note: Why isn't it 'les vas faire' and why isn't 'faire' in plural since 'les' implies many]

b) Elle pense pouvoir ses devoirs. ---> Elle pense pouvoir les faire.

[Note: as above]

c) Il voit arriver sa copine. ---> Il la voit arriver.

[Note: Why isn't it 'il voit l'arriver'??]

Thanks in advance! :)

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on April 22, 2012 at 7:54am

In general, the pronoun comes before the verb that it is most closely associated with, or put more technically, it comes before a verb that the pronoun is actually a grammatical object of.

So how do you know which verb it is the object of in these tricky cases of multiple verbs? Well, to explain it simply, it's usually the least "general" one. Or put another slightly more technical way, it's the verb that actually "selected" that object.

So as an example of what I mean by that, take your sentence "She's going to do her homework". You potentially have two verbs: "going" and "do". But if you think about it, "going" is very general: you could follow it with pretty much anything: "She's going to [ride her bike/cook dinner/go to the movies/etc]". But there's a sense in which "her homework" depends on the verb "do": for example, it makes less sense to say "She's going to drink her homework", because the verb "drink" usually has to take an object that is 'drinkable'. Or for example, it makes little sense to say "She's going to arrive her homework", because the verb "arrive" doesn't generally take an object at all.

So in other words, we conclude that "her homework" is the object of "do" because the verb "do" is in some sense what 'permits' you to say "her homework" in the first place. On the other hand, "going to..." is just a verb generic construction; the specific object "her homework" isn't dependent on you choosing that construction.

Similarly, in (b), "ses devoirs" is specifically dependent on the verb "faire": it's specifically the verb that, if you were to change it, would make it likely that you may no longer be able to include "ses devoirs"-- e.g. if substituted for "boire" or "arriver", then "Elle pense pouvoir [*boire/arriver] ses devoirs" make no sense. On the other hand, you could happily substitute "pouvoir" for another verb ("Elle pense DEVOIR faire ses devoirs", "Elle pense VOULOIR faire ses devoirs" and it wouldn't change the possibility of including "ses devoirs" -- "ses devoirs" isn't dependent on the verb "pouvoir". Similarly, you can effectively say "Elle pense ..." plus anything -- "ses devoirs" isn't specifically 'dependent' on this verb.

Case (c) might be a bit more difficult to apply this rule to (though it still essentially works: e.g. I can say "I saw her arriving" just as equally as "I saw her ...." + pretty much any other action, whereas the choices-- particularly in French-- that I could replace "saw" with are more restrictive). However, in French, this case is a bit easier to remember: in general if you have a verb of "perception" (so "voir" here, but another typical choice is "entendre", or "percevoir", "sentir") followed by an infinitive, then the object/pronoun is actually attached to the verb of perception. So "sa copine" is the object of "voit", and "la" goes before "voit".

[The same applies for "faire" and "laisser" when they are used with a special construction called a "causative", e.g. "Je l'ai laissé entrer". I won't go into all the details here, but look out for it.]