Passe compose

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on October 8, 2010 at 7:48am

The most common cases are:
- "reflexive" verbs where the subject and object are equivalent
- for non-reflective verbs, whenever you use être instead of avoir
In these cases, the past participle basically "agrees" with the subject.

The second case is actually simpler-- there are a handful of common essentially "movement/state-related" verbs that usually use être-- see the grammar page on when to use 'avoir' and 'être' for more details.

The first case effectively covers most "reflexive" verbs, and pretty much all the ones you'll come across when initially learning French. So for example:

Elle s'est lavée
Elles se sont assises sur le banc

in these case there's an idea of the person washing "herself" or the people sitting "themselves" down (even though that might not actually be the most natural way of saying it in English-- you'd probably say e.g. "She had a wash").

However, if you go into things in more detail (which you really don't need to unless you're studying French to quite a high level or are "just interested"), then there are complications. For example, consider this sentence:

Elles se sont ri(es) de lui
"They made fun of him"

Now, here you have a reflexive verb (with no direct object), so there's an argument for making the agreement. On the other hand, there isn't really a meaning of "they laughed themselves" -- the verb is just reflexive "because it is". So there's an argument for not making the agreement.

Either way, it has absolutely zero bearing on the pronunciation in this case.

The standard spelling system also inserts agreements where nowadays they're not pronounced. For example, in this case:

Voici les lettres que j'ai écrites
Here are the letters that I wrote

Voici les lettres qu'ils se sont écrites
Here are the letters they wrote to each other

In the firts of these cases, the standard rule is that the past participle agrees with a direct object if that direct object comes before the past participle. But this is really an artefact of the writing system these days: in spontaneous speech, it would be rare to make the agreement (so people would tend to say ...les lettres que j'ai écrit with no agreement).

Notice in the second of these last cases you effectively have a combination of both the last rule and the one about agreement with reflexive verbs only when the subject and object are equivalent. Since the thing that they wrote was the letters and not literally "each other", then the past participle agrees with les lettres: it's the direct object that comes before the past participle.

If this all sounds a bit complicated, then I would suggest just worrying about the very first two cases: "normal" reflexive verbs , and other verbs using être and forget about the other cases for now: they're irrelevant to speech, and rarely crop up in everyday writing.

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