Les pronoms toniques

I just started learning French a few weeks ago. Now I'd like to learn about Les pronom toniques. Thanks

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Permalink Reply by Erwan on August 23, 2011 at 7:17pm

Here are they :

Moi : Me

Toi : You

Lui : Him

Elle : Her

Nous : Us

Vous : You

Eux : Them (maculine)

Elles : Them (feminine)

Be careful with nous and vous. Do not mix the subject and the tonic pronoun.

Ex : Nous quittons l'appartement : we're leaving the flat

Ils nous quittent : They leave us

Vous nous quittez : You left us

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on August 23, 2011 at 7:43pm

It's also worth noting that these so-called "stressed"[1] pronouns aren't actually used to the same extent as the object pronouns "me", "him" etc in English.

In English, you would say I'm leaving him or He's leaving me. But in French, it's not grammatical to say Je quitte lui or Il quitte moi.

The "stressed" pronouns in French are basically used:

- as the object of a preposition (c'est pour moi)

- when conjoined with another subject/object: Marie et lui viennent = Him and Marie are coming; Je vois David et lui = I'm seeing David and him[2].

- when the pronoun isn't exactly a simple subject or object-- basically when you "don't know what else to do with it", it's probably a stressed pronoun (Je vois Marie, pas lui = I'm seeing Marie, not him; Moi, je viens demain = I'm coming tomorrow -- the extra "moi" added for emphasis/contrast)

[1] "Stressed", and indeed "tonique" in French, actually isn't a very accurate term. They're called this to contrast with so-called "unstressed" pronouns-- nowadays termed "clitics" by most linguists-- which are the ones placed before a verb and which usually don't occur in a stressed syllable. So it's not so much that the "stressed" pronouns are necessarily stressed as such, but more that they don't have to be unstressed, if that makes any sense. This name also comes from a time when linguists' understanding of "stressed" vs "unstressed" was more simplistic than it is today-- in reality there isn't just a simple contrast between just two types of stress status, but it doesn't matter too much for our purposes here.

[2] In formal writing, some speakers would avoid this, and find another way to express it, e.g. Je les vois, David et lui. But in practice in everyday speech, it's common to use the "stressed" pronoun as a direct conjoined object in this way.

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Permalink Reply by Erwan on August 23, 2011 at 7:58pm

There is a tricky phrase construction :

I miss him : Il me manque (It's possible to translate the phrase with je but it's not natural : Je suis en manque de lui)

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on August 23, 2011 at 8:37pm

Yes, interestingly there are a few cases like this.

Informally, we tend to think of the "subject" of the sentence as being the "thing or person that the sentece is about". But grammatically, the subject is simply the bit of the sentence that governs the verb form (more or less). And in fact the mapping between "thing the sentence is about" and subject or object is a little arbitrary, and different languages can do it in different ways.

So in English, one would usually say. "I miss you". It's not that the French 'mapping' is impossible-- we could say e.g. "You cause me yearning"-- it's just it's not the most common way round to express this in English. In French, conversely, there are ways to keep the English mapping, e.g. "Je te regrette", "Je te languis", but for this particular notion, they aren't so common in French (particular the latter of these).

Another common one to look out for is "plaîre", e.g. "Il me plaît" > "I like him".

Interetsingly, there are many more cases in Spanish of verbs operating "the other way round" compared to English.