question regarding participe present and past infinitive

Hi,

I'm having trouble knowing when to use:

participe present:

e.g.

"ayant accepté la défaite, les joueurs sont rentés chez eux"

and say, the past infinitve such as

Antoin est content d'avoir recu des nuvelles de son correspndant"

"apres avoir entendu cette chason, j'ai acheté le CD"

how do we know when to use apres avoir or participe present etc?

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EducatorPermalink Reply by George Hunt on August 12, 2012 at 11:51am

I think it is a case of the second and third of your examples having a preposition (après ) before the participle.

When that happens the infinitive (avoir) is used instead of the particle (ayant).

In english we would quite likely say "after having heard" but ,in french, you couldn't say "après ayant entendu" as that would be completely wrong-although I think it may have been possible in old Medieval French.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on August 13, 2012 at 2:35am

Hi Peter,

Firstly, as George mentions, sometimes it just depends on the syntax. In general, prepositions in French, if they take a verb phrase as their complement, generally have that verb in the infintiive.

This is different to English, were typically you can't use an infinitive with a preposition. So e.g. you'd say "without helping", not "*without to help". But in French, you'd say "sans aider", not "*sans aidant".

In the specific case you mention, either the construction with "ayant ..." or "après avoir ..." can basically be used. However, the construction with "ayant ..." is more formal. It's common, for example, in legal contracts.

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Key StudentPermalink Reply by Peter En on August 19, 2012 at 12:37pm

thanks Nei and George that was very useful!

So, am i to understand that they are quite interchangeable? It seems that whenever I use the present participle form, my teacher corrects it into the past infinitive- I don't have a specific example here, but is that something to do with it sounding better or more french?

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on August 19, 2012 at 1:57pm

They're sometimes interchangeable, but they do belong to slightly different registers and I think they have slightly different nuances.

If you use "après avoir...", you may or may not be implying a causal link between one action and the other.

If you use "ayant...", which as I say is of a more formal register, you're often implying a causal link between one action and another immediate or ongoing action.

For example, compare:

Après avoir terminé ses études, il a cherché son premier travail.

Narrating a "sequence of events".

Ayant terminé ses études, il cherche son premier travail.

Stresses that concluding his studies was an 'immediate cause' to the need to look for work. It's more or less a paraphrase of:

Maintenant qu'il a terminé ses études, ...

Notice that one other interesting feature of the "ayant..." construction is that you can use it-- again, in quite a formal register-- as an adjective phrase, for example:

Pour les étudiants ayant terminé leurs études cette année, le marché du travail actuel leur offre peu de possibilités.

So why your tutor changed it could be for a couple of reasons: maybe they thought it was a bit too formal for the context in question, or maybe it was a problem with the timeframe: that you were narrating more of a 'sequence of events' than the immediate 'juncture' or 'causation' between one action and another.