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# 10. Word classes

**On this page**

1. [1. Variable and invariable words; open and closed classes](#1-variable-and-invariable-words-open-and-closed-classes)
2. [2. The traditional classes and the UD classes](#2-the-traditional-classes-and-the-ud-classes)
3. [3. The classes one by one](#3-the-classes-one-by-one)
4. [4. Where the boundaries are hard](#4-where-the-boundaries-are-hard)
5. [5. The tag sets of the French treebanks](#5-the-tag-sets-of-the-french-treebanks)
6. [6. Word classes and word formation](#6-word-classes-and-word-formation)
7. [7. Multiword tokens, compounds and words that are not words](#7-multiword-tokens-compounds-and-words-that-are-not-words)
8. [8. Foreign words, symbols, abbreviations](#8-foreign-words-symbols-abbreviations)
9. [9. How Mova handles word classes](#9-how-mova-handles-word-classes)
10. [Sources for this chapter](#sources-for-this-chapter)

A word class (part of speech, *partie du discours*, *classe de mots*, *catégorie grammaticale*) is a set of words that share inflection and distribution: they take the same endings and occur in the same positions. French has far more inflection than English, so a good part of its classes can be told by **form**: nouns have a fixed gender and a number, adjectives and determiners agree, a regular verb has forty-five simple finite forms. But the written form hides much of it (the plural of the noun is silent, the feminine of many adjectives is silent, see [11. Nouns](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/11-nouns/) §1), and a large share of the common words belongs to more than one class (*que*, *le*, *en*, *tout*, *plus*, *comme*, *si*). This chapter lists the classes as the traditional grammars and as Universal Dependencies define them, gives the tests that tell them apart, counts them on the French treebanks, sets out the boundaries that are hard to draw, and says how Mova's tagger decides. The chapters that follow describe each class in turn: nouns ([11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/11-nouns/)), determiners, pronouns and numerals ([12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/12-determiners-pronouns-numerals/)), verbs ([13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/13-verbs/), [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/14-irregular-verbs/)), adjectives and adverbs ([15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/15-adjectives-adverbs/)).

## 1. Variable and invariable words; open and closed classes

The French school tradition, already in the nineteenth-century grammars (`bescherelle-1860`), divides the words first into **mots variables** (those that change form: noun, determiner, adjective, pronoun, verb) and **mots invariables** (adverb, preposition, conjunction, interjection). The division is useful because it names what a learner must memorise, but it is not exact. Adverbs such as *tout* ("quite") agree in some uses (*elle est toute contente*); many pronouns are variable for gender and number (*celui, celle, ceux, celles*) while others are not (*on, rien, qui*); numerals vary only in some words (*quatre-vingts*, *deux cents*).

Another division is by openness.

|  | open (lexical, content) classes | closed (function, grammatical) classes |
| --- | --- | --- |
| members | nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs in *-ment* | determiners, pronouns, auxiliaries, prepositions, conjunctions, most simple adverbs of degree and negation |
| new members | constantly: by derivation ([16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/16-derivation-prefixes/), [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/17-derivation-suffixes/)), compounding ([18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/18-compounding-conversion-minor/)), borrowing ([19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/19-lexicon-mwe-register/)) | almost never; change is slow and shows as one word replacing another (the spoken *ça* beside *cela*, *on* beside *nous*) |
| stress | carry the phrase stress, which falls on the last full syllable of the group ([03](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/03-syllable-stress-intonation/)) | clitic or unstressed (*le, la, de, ne, je, que*) |
| frequency | many words, each rare | few words, each very frequent |
| in the treebanks | NOUN, PROPN, VERB, ADJ, ADV | DET, PRON, ADP, AUX, CCONJ, SCONJ |

In UD French GSD (UD 2.18, all three files, 400 385 words after the splitting of contractions, counted 2026-11-06) the closed classes DET, ADP, PRON, AUX, CCONJ and SCONJ together make 169 026 tokens, 42.2% of the words; the single most frequent lemma is the article *le* (43 301 tokens as a determiner), followed by the preposition *de* (31 302). The open classes NOUN, PROPN, VERB, ADJ, ADV total 173 113, 43.2%; punctuation is 11.0%.

## 2. The traditional classes and the UD classes

### 2.1 The traditional list

The French grammars of the nineteenth century follow the classical tradition and count **ten** "kinds of words" (*espèces de mots*); the *Grammaire nationale* of the Bescherelles lists them in this order (`bescherelle-1860`, in its opening chapter on the kinds of words): the noun (*nom*), the article, the adjective, the pronoun, the verb, the participle, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction and the interjection. The participle was a class of its own because it is "verb and adjective". The school grammar of the late twentieth century reduces the list to **nine** classes by dropping the participle (it is a verb form, or an adjective) and replacing the article by the larger class of the **déterminant** (article, demonstrative, possessive, indefinite, numeral, interrogative and exclamative determiners). The modern scholarly grammars follow a similar list, with finer subclasses (the *Grammaire méthodique* of Riegel, Pellat and Rioul, `riegel-2021`, which we know by its card only).

| traditional class | variable? | subclasses | example |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| *nom* | gender fixed, number | common, proper; count, mass; concrete, abstract; animate | *table, Paris, courage* |
| *déterminant* | gender, number | article (definite, indefinite, partitive), demonstrative, possessive, numeral, indefinite, interrogative | *la, un, du, ce, mon, trois, plusieurs, quel* |
| *adjectif (qualificatif)* | gender, number | qualifying, relational (*présidentiel*), ordinal | *grand, français, premier* |
| *pronom* | varies | personal (weak, strong), reflexive, demonstrative, possessive, relative, interrogative, indefinite | *je, lui, celui-ci, le mien, qui, quoi, rien* |
| *verbe* | person, number, tense, mood | lexical, auxiliary, modal-like, pronominal | *chanter, avoir, pouvoir, se lever* |
| *adverbe* | invariable | manner, degree, time, place, negation, interrogation, sentence adverb | *vite, très, hier, ici, ne … pas, comment, heureusement* |
| *préposition* | invariable | simple, compound (*à cause de*), contracted with the article (*au, du*) | *à, de, sur, grâce à* |
| *conjonction* | invariable | coordinating, subordinating | *et, mais, que, quand* |
| *interjection* | invariable | exclamations, onomatopoeia, discourse words | *ah, hélas, zut, ben* |

### 2.2 The UD list

Universal Dependencies fixes seventeen universal parts of speech (UPOS) for all languages, and each language says how it uses them (`demarneffe-2021`; `guillaume-2019` describes the French case). GSD uses sixteen of them (there is no PART). The table gives the mapping and the count in UD French GSD (UD 2.18, 2026-11-06).

| UPOS | traditional equivalent | GSD tokens | share |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| NOUN | common noun | 75 330 | 18.8% |
| ADP | preposition (contractions are split, see §7) | 63 543 | 15.9% |
| DET | article and other determiners | 61 098 | 15.3% |
| PUNCT | punctuation | 44 005 | 11.0% |
| VERB | lexical verb, in any form | 31 769 | 7.9% |
| PROPN | proper noun | 27 693 | 6.9% |
| ADJ | adjective (some participles) | 23 820 | 5.9% |
| PRON | pronoun, including the clitic pronouns | 17 687 | 4.4% |
| ADV | adverb, including *ne* and *pas* | 14 501 | 3.6% |
| AUX | auxiliary: *être, avoir, faire* … | 13 081 | 3.3% |
| CCONJ | coordinating conjunction | 10 634 | 2.7% |
| NUM | cardinal number (and digits) | 10 479 | 2.6% |
| SCONJ | subordinating conjunction | 2 983 | 0.7% |
| X | foreign word and other unclassified | 2 957 | 0.7% |
| SYM | symbol (*%, /, €, °*) | 718 | 0.2% |
| INTJ | interjection | 87 | 0.02% |
| total |  | 400 385 |  |

The same mapping applies to the other open French treebanks, with different proportions that show the genre. The spoken ones (ParisStories, 42 789 words; Rhapsodie, 44 234 words; counted 2026-11-06) have a much richer function-word and discourse profile than the written GSD.

| UPOS | GSD (written, news, wiki, blogs) | ParisStories (spoken, urban) | Rhapsodie (spoken, prosodic) | Sequoia (written, 70 545 words) |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| NOUN | 18.8% | 10.3% | 11.8% | 21.3% |
| PROPN | 6.9% | 1.0% | 2.2% | 4.6% |
| PRON | 4.4% | 14.9% | 11.9% | 3.9% |
| VERB | 7.9% | 9.9% | 9.4% | 8.3% |
| INTJ | 0.02% | 5.6% | 4.3% | 0.01% |
| ADV | 3.6% | 8.2% | 7.4% | 3.8% |
| DET | 15.3% | 8.1% | 10.1% | 14.7% |
| ADP | 15.9% | 8.1% | 9.6% | 15.9% |

Where the written French has the nominal profile (nouns, determiners, prepositions: 50% of the words), speech has three times the pronouns, a seventh of the proper names and an interjection class that is a twentieth of all words (*ben, bah, euh, ouais, hein, bon*). A tagger trained on GSD alone has seen 87 interjections; speech needs its own treatment, in [37. Register and variation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/37-register-and-variation/) and [38. Dialogue, discourse markers and reported speech](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/38-dialogue-and-discourse-markers/).

### 2.3 Features

UD adds **features** to the part of speech, and French uses the usual ones. In GSD, of the 75 330 NOUN tokens 30 689 are `Gender=Masc|Number=Sing`, 25 654 `Fem|Sing`, 10 961 `Masc|Plur`, 7 574 `Fem|Plur`; 4 + 17 + 134 + 92 + 205 tokens (the epicene, the unmarked and the foreign) lack one or both. Of the 23 820 ADJ, 12 726 are masculine and 11 094 feminine. The feature `PronType` has the values `Prs` (personal, 11 354 pronoun tokens), `Rel` (3 103), `Dem` (1 633), `Ind` (1 416), `Neg` (114), `Int` (67). The old tag set in the Penn style (the XPOS column) is **empty** in GSD (all 400 385 tokens carry `_`), so Mova must make its own tags from the UPOS and the features ([§9](#9-how-mova-handles-word-classes)).

## 3. The classes one by one

### 3.1 Nouns

**Form**: a fixed gender; a plural, silent in most words, with the exceptions of [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/11-nouns/) §5. **Distribution**: head of a noun phrase; preceded by a determiner (a bare noun is rare: *chercher fortune*, *avoir faim*, *par avion*); modified by an adjective, a prepositional phrase (*la maison de ma sœur*), a relative clause. **Subclasses**: common/proper; count/mass (*des pommes* / *du pain*); animate/inanimate; the **epicene** nouns with one form for both sexes (*un/une élève, un/une enfant, un/une collègue*) and the nouns with one gender for both sexes (*une personne, une victime, un témoin*); the count/mass contrast is in [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/11-nouns/). The tests that separate the nouns from other classes are: takes the definite article without changing sense (*le manger* and *le boire* are nominalised infinitives, see §4.5); takes a plural; can be the subject of a verb.

### 3.2 Determiners

The determiner is the class that the nineteenth-century grammars did not have as such. Its members are **closed** and each carries gender and number agreement with the noun (*plusieurs* has a plural only and *chaque* a singular only; both are invariable in gender): the definite *le/la/l'/les*, the indefinite *un/une/des*, the partitive *du/de la/de l'/des*, the demonstrative *ce/cet/cette/ces*, the possessive *mon, ma, mes, ton, son, notre, votre, leur…*, the interrogative-exclamative *quel*, the indefinites *plusieurs, chaque, certain, aucun, nul, tout, quelques, différents, divers*, the numerals when used before a noun (*trois livres*). **Test**: it stands before a noun and excludes another determiner (**le mon livre*; Italian and Portuguese permit it). In GSD DET is 61 098 tokens, of which the lemma *le* is 43 301, *un* 10 065, *son* 4 348, *ce* 2 214, *plusieurs* 252, *quelques* 150, *tout* 136, *chaque* 133, *certain* 132, *aucun* 108 (UD lemmas, 2026-11-06). Details in [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/12-determiners-pronouns-numerals/).

### 3.3 Pronouns

The pronoun replaces a noun phrase and **never takes a determiner of its own**: it is a full noun phrase (*il, lui, celui-ci, le mien, qui, rien, quelqu'un*). French splits the personal pronouns into **weak** or **clitic** forms, which cannot stand alone and attach to the verb (*je, tu, il, me, te, le, lui, y, en…*), and **strong** or disjoint forms (*moi, toi, lui, eux, soi*), which can stand alone (*Qui est là ? — Moi.*). The clitics are unstressed, ordered in a fixed cluster before the verb ([12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/12-determiners-pronouns-numerals/) §9) and are written as separate words in the traditional spelling (*je le lui dis*), joined to the verb by a hyphen only in the imperative and in inversion (*dis-le-lui*). **Subclasses by UD feature `PronType`**: `Prs` personal and reflexive (11 354 in GSD, 64% of the class), `Rel` (*qui, que, dont, lequel*, 3 103), `Dem` (*ce, celui, ceci, cela*, 1 633), `Ind` (*on, rien, personne, tout, plusieurs*, 1 416), `Neg` (114), `Int` (67). A trap for counting: GSD gives the third-person pronouns one lemma, *lui*, whatever the form (*il, elle, ils, elles, le, la, les, lui, leur, eux*: 6 631 PRON tokens), as it gives *moi* to *je, me, moi* and *soi* to *se*; a count "by lemma" of the personal pronouns is therefore a count of persons, and the forms must be counted by form ([12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/12-determiners-pronouns-numerals/)).

The three forms with several values deserve a mention. *Qui* and *que* are pronouns, relative or interrogative, in GSD; *dont* is a pronoun (283 tokens) and *où* an adverb (402). *On* ("one", "we") is a pronoun with no gender and no number of its own (the verb is singular); its value "we" is a register matter ([37. Register and variation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/37-register-and-variation/)). *Y* and *en* (536 and 282 tokens as pronouns in GSD) stand for a prepositional phrase (*j'y vais*, *j'en viens*); they are the "pro-adverbs" of the older grammars and are PRON in UD because they can stand for a noun phrase.

### 3.4 Verbs and auxiliaries

**Form**: tense, mood, person and number (the "finite" forms, with the person mostly clear from the subject clitic alone in speech), and the non-finite forms: infinitive, present participle (*chantant*, the *gérondif* with *en*), past participle (*chanté*, which agrees in gender and number in several constructions). **Distribution**: the predicate of the clause; takes a subject (even the impersonal *il*); negated by *ne … pas* around the finite verb. **UD**: all verb forms are VERB, but the three verbs that form compound tenses and the passive are AUX: *être* (9 460 in GSD), *avoir* (3 340), and *faire* (271) in the causative and the sense "have done". The list is short by decision: the earlier GSD releases also counted modal and aspectual auxiliaries and some verbs of state as copulas, and the revision reduced the auxiliaries to *être, avoir, faire* and the copula to *être* (`guillaume-2019`, §4.2.1). *Aller* is therefore VERB even in the periphrastic future (*il va pleuvoir*): the lemma has 261 VERB tokens and 3 NOUN (*un aller*, "outward journey"). *Pouvoir, devoir, vouloir, savoir* are VERB too (modals are not a UD class). The periphrases and the modal-like verbs are described in [13. Verbs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/13-verbs/) and [14. Irregular verbs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/14-irregular-verbs/). In GSD the participles are VERB (12 676 tokens with `VerbForm=Part`) when they head a clause or form a tense, and ADJ when they are used as an attributive adjective (*une porte fermée*, see §4.4).

### 3.5 Adjectives

**Form**: agrees in gender and number with the noun it qualifies (*grand, grande, grands, grandes*), with a silent or audible feminine. **Distribution**: modifier of a noun, after it by default (*un livre intéressant*), before it for a short closed list of frequent adjectives (*un petit livre*, *une belle maison*); predicate after *être, sembler, devenir*; modified by *très, plus, assez, trop*. **Subclasses**: qualifying (*grand, rouge*), relational, derived from a noun (*présidentiel, solaire*) and so not gradable, ordinal numerals (*premier, deuxième*), the adjectives of nationality (*français*; the noun *Français* has a capital). Details of agreement, position and comparison in [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/15-adjectives-adverbs/). In GSD ADJ is 5.9%: *premier, nouveau, public, national, grand*, many of them in the plural.

### 3.6 Adverbs

The adverb is **invariable** and modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb or a whole clause. It is the least homogeneous of the classes. **Subclasses**: manner (*vite, bien, doucement*); degree (*très, trop, assez, plus*); time (*hier, déjà, toujours*); place (*ici, là, partout*); negation (*ne, pas, jamais, plus, guère*); interrogation (*comment, pourquoi, quand, où, combien*); sentence adverbs (*heureusement, peut-être, apparemment*); connectives (*donc, ainsi, pourtant, alors, d'ailleurs*). The suffix *-ment* makes manner adverbs from adjectives ([15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/15-adjectives-adverbs/) §10, [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/17-derivation-suffixes/)). In GSD the most frequent ADV lemmas are *ne* (1 636), *plus* (1 339), *pas* (1 037), *très* (508), *aussi* (409), *où* (402), *alors* (376), *ainsi* (376), *bien* (349), *également* (321); *ne* and *pas* alone are over a sixth of all adverbs, because the two-part negation puts both in the class ([27. Negation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/27-negation/)). *Ne* is tagged ADV with `Polarity=Neg`. Its frequency is a register marker: GSD has 1 636 *ne* against 1 037 *pas* (*ne* also pairs with *plus, jamais, rien*), ParisStories has 78 *ne* against 416 *pas*, Rhapsodie 220 against 374 (counted 2026-11-06): in spoken French *ne* is mostly dropped.

### 3.7 Prepositions

Prepositions introduce a noun phrase, an infinitive or a pronoun and form with it a phrase that is an adjunct or a complement: *à, de, en, dans, pour, par, sur, avec, sans, sous, chez, entre, vers, depuis, pendant, selon*. Two of them, *de* and *à*, are the most grammaticalised: *de* marks the genitive relation, the partitive, the agent, the infinitive complement (*essayer de partir*), and *à* the indirect object and the infinitive (*apprendre à nager*). In GSD, *de* alone is 31 302 of the 63 543 ADP tokens (49%), *à* 10 630 (17%), *en* 5 860, *dans* 3 137, *pour* 2 531, *par* 2 467. **Complex prepositions** are fixed expressions with the same function (*à cause de, grâce à, auprès de, en face de, afin de, par rapport à*); UD treats them as multiword expressions with `fixed`. **Contractions** with the definite article: *à + le = au, à + les = aux, de + le = du, de + les = des*; in GSD these are *multiword tokens* (11 022 of them, §7) split into ADP + DET: *du* → *de* + *le*.

### 3.8 Conjunctions

**Coordinating** (CCONJ): *et, ou, mais, car, donc, or, ni*, and the correlatives (*soit … soit, ni … ni*). The classical mnemonic "mais, ou, et, donc, or, ni, car" lists the seven. In GSD: *et* 8 132, *ou* 890, *mais* 833, *puis* 266, *car* 127. **Subordinating** (SCONJ): *que* (the complementizer, 2 260 by lemma if counted with the contracted *qu'*), *si, comme, lorsque, quand, puisque, parce que, bien que, quoique, afin que, pour que, avant que*, with their compound forms in *que*. A subordinator may bring a mood choice: *bien que* and *pour que* require the subjunctive ([24. Coordination and subordination](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/24-coordination-subordination/)). *Comme* is a conjunction (*comme il pleut*), a preposition (*comme un chien*), an adverb of exclamation (*comme c'est beau !*); in GSD its 530 ADP tokens exceed its SCONJ ones (161).

### 3.9 Interjections and discourse words

Interjections are sentence-like words that do not enter the syntax: exclamations (*ah, oh, hélas, zut, bravo*), greetings and politeness words (*salut, merci, bonjour, pardon*), onomatopoeia (*boum, ouf, aïe*), and in speech the discourse markers *ben, bah, bon, quoi, hein, voilà, tiens, allez, écoute*. GSD has 87; the lemmas are *merci* 18, *bref* 13, *oui* 10, *attention* 9, *bravo* 7, *dommage* 6. ParisStories has 2 391 and Rhapsodie 1 910 INTJ tokens, 5.6% and 4.3% of their words; the discourse-marker side belongs to the pragmatics chapters.

### 3.10 Numerals

The numeral is not a class of its own in the traditional French list but a subset of determiners, adjectives, nouns and pronouns. UD gives it a part of speech NUM for the **cardinal** numbers in any use, determiner-like or not (*deux* 636, *trois* 243, *quatre* 125; the digits 2, 3, 5 and years like 2010: 159, 134, 131, 123 in GSD). The word *un* is NUM only in the counting sense (60 tokens), DET as the article (4 153) and PRON in *l'un … l'autre* (187). **Ordinal** numerals are ADJ (*premier, deuxième, dernier*). The number system itself is in [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/12-determiners-pronouns-numerals/) §7.

## 4. Where the boundaries are hard

### 4.1 Determiner or pronoun: *le, la, les, un, leur, tout*

The forms *le, la, les* are the definite article before a noun and the object clitic pronoun before a verb. In GSD: *le* is DET 15 425, PRON 283; *la* DET 10 956, PRON 109; *les* DET 9 738, PRON 129 (counts of the form, lowercased; 2026-11-06). The position is a good test (the article before a noun or its pre-nominal modifiers, the pronoun before a finite verb or infinitive) but not a perfect one: the pronoun follows the verb in the affirmative imperative (*prends-le*), stands before the presentatives *voici, voilà* (*les voici*), and the article stands before a nominalised infinitive (*le savoir*). *Leur* is a possessive determiner (*leur maison*, 455 in GSD, *leurs* 211) and a pronoun in *je leur dis* (51); the determiner takes the plural of the possessed thing (*leurs maisons*), the pronoun is invariable. The form *un* is the indefinite article (4 153), the pronoun in *l'un des deux* (187), the numeral (60). The form *tout* is an adjective (86), an adverb (140), a pronoun (112) and a determiner (48). GSD's choices for the whole lemma (all four forms) show the convention: the predeterminer of *tous ces enfants, toute la journée* is **ADJ** with the relation `amod` (455 of the lemma's tokens are ADJ `amod`); the word before a noun without an article is DET (*tout homme, toute personne*, 136); the pronoun is *tout est perdu*, *ils sont tous là* (112); the adverb is *tout contents, tout à fait* (143).

### 4.2 *Que* in four values

*Que* is the most multifunctional word in French. In GSD (form *que*, 1 962 tokens before elision): SCONJ 1 578 (*je pense que…*), PRON 231 (relative *le livre que j'ai lu*; interrogative *que veux-tu ?*), ADV 153 (restrictive *ne … que*, exclamative *que c'est beau !*, comparative *plus grand que*). The comparative *que* is often annotated SCONJ as well; the treebank's choice is reported rather than the grammarian's. A learner reads the four from the context: after *ne* it is "only"; after a comparative it is "than"; after a noun phrase with a missing object it is the relative; otherwise a complementizer.

### 4.3 *En* and *y*: preposition or pronoun

*En* is a preposition (*en France, en dormant*, 5 860 tokens in GSD) and a pronoun (*j'en veux*, 282). The two do not overlap by position, since the pronoun stands before the verb or its auxiliary, but a single word form must be told apart by the tagger. *Y* is a pronoun only (536).

### 4.4 Participle: verb or adjective

The past participle belongs to both classes. In the passive and compound tenses it is part of the verb; in *une porte fermée* it is an adjective, and in *la porte est fermée* either (state or passive, see [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/13-verbs/) §13). The test is whether the participle can be modified by *très* (*très fermé*: adjective; **très fermée par le gardien*) or has an agent phrase in *par* (verb). A rough upper bound for how often the choice arises: 3 566 GSD ADJ tokens end in a past-participle ending (*-é, -ée, -és, -ées, -i, -ie, -is, -u, -ue, -us*), a count that also includes true adjectives such as *joli* and *vrai* (counted 2026-11-06). The present participle (*chantant*) is VERB; the *adjectif verbal* (*une histoire amusante*) is ADJ and agrees. The **gérondif** (*en chantant*) is a verb form with *en*. Compare the English manual's treatment of *-ing* forms.

### 4.5 Substantivised words

Any word can be used as a noun when it takes a determiner: the infinitive (*le boire et le manger*, *le savoir*), the adjective (*le beau, les riches, un Français*), the adverb (*le pourquoi*, *le mieux*), the preposition (*le pour et le contre*), a conjunction (*les si et les mais*), a whole quotation. The UD guidelines let a converted word keep its class when it is only used as a head (an adjective *riche* in *les riches* stays ADJ; GSD has 37 ADJ and 1 NOUN tokens of the lemma *riche*, counted 2026-11-06), and give NOUN to words whose noun use is lexicalised (*le déjeuner*, *le dîner*, *le pouvoir*, *le devoir*). Where exactly the line falls in the treebank is the annotators' choice and is not uniform.

### 4.6 Adverb or preposition or adjective

Many words work as preposition and adverb, depending on whether they have a complement: *avant, après, depuis, derrière, devant, dessus, dessous, autour, contre, pour*. *Il est arrivé avant* (adverb), *avant la fin* (preposition). The adjectival adverbs (*parler fort, chanter juste, coûter cher, voir clair, travailler dur*) are invariable and keep the adjective's form; they are ADV in the treebanks. *Debout* and *ensemble* are adverbs; *même* is an adverb (*même lui*), an adjective (*le même jour*) and a pronoun (*le même*); *tel* is an adjective; *autre* an adjective or a pronoun; *plus* an adverb in all but the noun use (*un plus*, 2 tokens in GSD).

### 4.7 Invariable adjectives and nouns used as adjectives

Colour nouns as adjectives (*orange, marron, cerise, citron*) are invariable (*des yeux marron*), unlike *rose, mauve, pourpre, écarlate*, which agree. Nouns as adjectives (*une jupe bleu marine*, *une personne cool*, *des tarifs maison*) are ADJ if they can be modified (*très cool*), NOUN if they behave as appositions. The question is largely the one of the English manual on noun modifiers; French writes them without a hyphen and invariable.

### 4.8 Proper nouns

PROPN is 6.9% of GSD words (27 693) and in Wikipedia-like texts names run in sequences linked by `flat:name`: 7 005 GSD tokens have that relation. A name may contain a common noun (*la Banque de France*), a determiner, a preposition (*Charles de Gaulle*), and still be one name; the UPOS of the inner words follows their own class when the name is transparent (*Banque* NOUN) and PROPN when it is not (*Gaulle*). The capital letter is the writing marker, with the caveats of [07. Punctuation, typography, capitals, abbreviations and numbers](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/07-punctuation-typography/).

## 5. The tag sets of the French treebanks

### 5.1 UD

The nine UD French treebanks that Mova holds are annotated in UD 2.18 with the UPOS set and a common feature set. The conversion from the older annotation scheme into UD is described by `guillaume-2019`: of the roughly two hundred rewriting rules that transform the Sequoia and French Treebank format into UD, a large part are simple changes of part-of-speech label (the paper's own example: *N* becomes `NOUN`) and of the names of features (*g=m* becomes `Gender=Masc`). The authors also note that the conversion treats the copula and the dependent relations in the order that makes the rule set simplest. The features in use in GSD (tokens carrying each, counted 2026-11-06) are `Number` 223 951, `Gender` 168 176, `PronType` 79 368, `Definite` 53 470, `VerbForm` 44 816, `Person` 39 299, `Tense` and `Mood` 24 877 each, `Voice` 11 160, `Emph` 10 298 (the strong-pronoun and *-même* marker), `Case` 8 065, `ExtPos` 4 583 (the class of a word inside a fixed expression), `Poss` 4 359, `Polarity` 3 240, `Reflex` 2 490, `Foreign` 1 946, `Typo` 936, `NumType` 216. The annotation of GSD has been repeatedly corrected since its first release, in a process that fixes similar errors in similar contexts everywhere at once (`guillaume-2019`).

### 5.2 The French Treebank (FTB) scheme

The first big treebank of French, the French Treebank of Abeillé, Clément and Toussenel (2003), annotated the newspaper *Le Monde* with a tag set that is often compared with the Penn Treebank's. The corpus has **eleven lexical categories**, plus ET (foreign word) and PONCT (punctuation); the categories carry subcategories (conjunction: subordinating or coordinating; noun: common or proper) and give **41 tags**, and **218** once the inflectional information is added, against 36 tags of the Penn Treebank (`abeille-2019`). The tagger used in the original annotation worked with a reduced set of 103 tags, estimated at an 8% error rate at the time. Two choices differ from the UD ones: weak pronouns are a separate category of **clitics** (CL) and the strong pronouns another one (PRO); and the words *au* and *du* are **not split** (the corpus keeps one token). The corpus also records the internal categories of compound words (*bien que* is a compound subordinator whose parts are an adverb and a conjunction), and in the author's retrospective the numerals ought to have had one tag instead of four (determiner, adjective, noun, pronoun). The impersonal *il* and the passive past participle had no separate label in the first version; later versions added them (the paper cites Ribeyre et al. 2014).

The exact inventory of the 41 tags is in the corpus guide (Abeillé and Clément 1999), which we have not read; the statistical parsing experiments on the FTB use reduced variants of it.

### 5.3 What is common, what differs

| point | FTB / Sequoia (older) | UD French (GSD, Sequoia-UD…) |
| --- | --- | --- |
| weak pronouns | clitic class CL, strong pronouns PRO | PRON with `PronType=Prs`, `Case`, `Reflex` for both |
| contractions | *au, du* kept as one token | two syntactic words (ADP + DET) in one multiword token |
| compound words | one token with an internal structure | one token only for a few; most compounds are separate words linked by `fixed`, `flat` or `compound` |
| auxiliary | one verb category (no separate auxiliary class in the paper's list) | `AUX` UPOS for *être, avoir* when they serve a tense or the passive |
| numerals | four tags by use (determiner, adjective, noun, pronoun) | NUM for cardinals, ordinals as ADJ |
| tags | ~41 / 218 with inflection | 17 UPOS + features |

### 5.4 Quality of the tagging

On edited written French the taggers are accurate enough that the evaluation itself becomes the question: Wisniewski (`wisniewski-2019`) shows on French part-of-speech tagging that much smaller test sets than the usual ones give the same ranking of systems, and that the examples saved can go into training, which helps most in domain adaptation. The FTB's own retrospective measured the agreement of a new expert with the corpus at κ = 0.99 on the main categories and 0.97 on the full tags; the disagreements were the ones of §4: adjective or past participle, adverb or preposition, the indefinites *l'un, l'autre* as determiner, adjective or pronoun, and *de* as preposition or determiner (`abeille-2019`, §4.1). Text outside the norm is another matter. On a small corpus of administrative and political texts in inclusive French (177 inclusive tokens), TreeTagger and spaCy made 3 to 7 points more tagging errors than on the same texts rewritten in standard French; the median-dot forms (*doctorant·e·s*) were the worst, mistagged on 8 and 12 of 17 tokens, while the coordination of both forms (*toutes et tous*) caused no extra errors, and TreeTagger gave no lemma at all for the new forms (`grouin-2022`). The forms are in [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/11-nouns/).

## 6. Word classes and word formation

The class of a derived word is given by its suffix ([17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/17-derivation-suffixes/)): *-tion, -té, -ité, -ment, -age, -eur, -isme* make nouns; *-able, -ible, -eux, -al, -if, -ique, -aire* make adjectives; *-iser, -ifier, -er* make verbs; *-ment* makes adverbs. The prefixes keep the class ([16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/16-derivation-prefixes/)). Conversion (a word moved from one class to another without a mark: *le boire, un rien, le bleu, un plus*) is in [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/18-compounding-conversion-minor/). The derivational database VerNom (`missud-2020`) gives verb–noun pairs acquired from a very large corpus; the 2019 families-and-paradigms study of French derivation (`sanacore-2019`) shows the semantic relations between members of a derivational family.

## 7. Multiword tokens, compounds and words that are not words

The tokenisation determines the classes: the UD treebanks segment the text into **syntactic words**, not graphic words. The graphic word *du* is two syntactic words (*de* + *le*); *au* is *à* + *le*; *des* is *de* + *les* (preposition + article) but also the plain indefinite plural article *des*, which stays one token (DET); *duquel* is *de* + *lequel*. Elided forms are separate tokens after the apostrophe split: *l'ami* → *l'* *ami*; *qu'il* → *qu'* *il*; *aujourd'hui* is one word. In inversion the verb and the clitic are split at the first hyphen and the hyphen stays on the clitic: *a-t-il* is *a* + *-t-il* (PRON, 59 tokens in GSD), *est-ce* is *est* + *-ce* (27), *voulez-vous* is *voulez* + *-vous*; lexicalised hyphenated words stay one token (*peut-être* ADV 24, *aujourd'hui* ADV 142). In GSD there are 11 022 multiword-token ranges (counted 2026-11-06, lowercased: *du* 4 390, *des* 3 298, *au* 2 477, *aux* 808, and 49 of *auquel, duquel, auxquels, desquelles, auxquelles*), 2.75% of the number of words; every one of them is a preposition fused with the article.

## 8. Foreign words, symbols, abbreviations

GSD marks 2 957 tokens X (0.7%): mostly English words in names and titles (*of* 83, *The* 53, *the* 37, *and* 27, *in* 22), the placeholder `_`, *etc.* (28) and some French fragments. Symbols are SYM (718): the percent sign (296), the slash (123), the euro (45), the degree sign (33), the ampersand (26). Abbreviations keep the class of the full word (*M.* is PROPN or NOUN, *km* NOUN); units are NOUN (*h* 89, *km* 76, *kg* 22 tokens of the form). In the written text the elements of an acronym are one token (*SNCF*, PROPN). The abbreviations and typography are in [07. Punctuation, typography, capitals, abbreviations and numbers](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/07-punctuation-typography/).

## 9. How Mova handles word classes

**There is no French tagger in Mova.** The English parser `en` reads a French treebank after its tags have been brought to the Penn-style tag set it knows, by the command `en xpos-fill IN.conllu OUT.conllu` (function `xpos_fill` and `xpos_of` in `en/src/main.rs`). It fills the XPOS column of every token whose XPOS is `_` or is not an English tag (which is the case for all of GSD) with a tag computed from UPOS and FEATS alone:

| UPOS (+ features) | XPOS |
| --- | --- |
| NOUN | `NN`; `NNS` if `Number=Plur` |
| PROPN | `NNP`; `NNPS` if plural |
| VERB, AUX | tested in this order: `VB` if `VerbForm=Inf`; `VBG` if `VerbForm=Part` and `Tense=Pres`; `VBN` for any other participle; `VBG` if `VerbForm=Ger`; `VBD` if `Tense=Past` or `Tense=Imp`; `VBZ` if `Person=3` and `Number=Sing`; else `VBP` |
| ADJ | `JJ` |
| ADV | `RB`; `WRB` if interrogative or relative |
| ADP, SCONJ | `IN` |
| DET | `DT`; `PRP$` if possessive; `WDT` if interrogative or relative |
| PRON | `PRP`; `PRP$` if possessive; `WP` if relative or interrogative |
| CCONJ | `CC` |
| NUM | `CD` |
| INTJ | `UH` |
| SYM | `SYM` |
| PUNCT | `,`, `.`, `-LRB-`, `-RRB-`, `''`, `''`, `HYPH` or `:` by the form |
| anything else (X) | `FW` |

The mapping drops the French distinctions that English does not draw: gender, the three persons (the English `VBZ`/`VBP` contrast only separates the third person singular from the rest), the mood (the subjunctive, the conditional and the imperative become `VBZ`/`VBP` like the present indicative; the passé simple and the imperfect both become `VBD`), the clitic/strong contrast, the partitive. One branch does not do what its name says on GSD: the treebank keeps the tense of a participle in the MISC column (`Tense[denom]=Pres` or `Past`), not in FEATS, and has no `VerbForm=Ger`, so neither `VBG` branch fires and all 13 769 participles of GSD (VERB and AUX), the 1 705 present participles (`Tense[denom]=Pres`) included, become `VBN` (counted 2026-11-06; see [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/13-verbs/)). What survives is the contrast infinitive / participle / finite verb, with the finite verb split by `VBD` and by person, which is enough for the parser to find the verbal heads and their auxiliaries.

**Measured.** On UD French GSD (UD 2.18, train → dev, 2026-10-22) `en parse-eval` gives LAS 87.00 with the parser's own tags and 89.78 with the treebank's gold tags; the difference of 2.78 points is what the tagger's own errors cost. The tagger's accuracy on unknown words is 84.8%; 10.07% of the dev NOUN tokens have a form not in the training noun forms (684 of 6 792), and 8.48% of the non-punctuation dev words (2 706 of 31 919).

**Not done.**

- Gender, the French verb morphology, the clitic class, the choice between homographs from French lexical knowledge: none of this is in the tagger; it learns from the context in the training treebank, so a form that is ambiguous in GSD (*que*, *le*, *en*, *tout*; of the 42 626 distinct lowercased forms of GSD, 3 107 occur with more than one UPOS, and the tokens of those forms are 52.7% of the corpus, counted 2026-11-06) is decided from the left and right neighbours.
- There is no French lexicon: no list of determiners, no list of auxiliaries, no lemmas other than those in the treebank.
- The classes of the closed lists in this chapter (the determiners, the pronouns, the prepositions, the subordinators) could be derived from the treebanks as a first closed lexicon, since the closed classes are covered almost completely by a few hundred lemmas; no tool does it today.
- The FTB tag set (the clitic and strong-pronoun categories, the unsplit contractions) is not read.

**Possible next steps** that this chapter suggests: a table of homograph pairs (§4) with the disambiguating context, to be used as seeds in the way the English manual's seeds are used; a check of the UPOS+FEATS combination against the closed lists above (a noun with `Gender` missing, a DET with `PronType=Rel`); a spoken-French check of the INTJ and discourse-marker class, since an English-trained tagger has a very different interjection profile.

## Sources for this chapter

- Bescherelle, L.-N. et al., *Grammaire nationale* (1860 ed., `bescherelle-1860`, public domain): the ten kinds of words, variable and invariable.
- Abeillé, A., Clément, L. & Toussenel, F. 2003, French Treebank; the retrospective presentation: Abeillé, A., Clément, L. & Liégeois, L. 2019, *Un corpus arboré pour le français : le French Treebank* (`abeille-2019`, CC BY 4.0): categories, tag counts, clitics, compound words.
- Guillaume, B., de Marneffe, M.-C. & Perrier, G. 2019, *Conversion et améliorations de corpus du français annotés en Universal Dependencies* (`guillaume-2019`, CC BY 4.0): conversion rules, the 17 UPOS, the copula rule.
- de Marneffe, M.-C., Manning, C., Nivre, J. & Zeman, D. 2021, *Universal Dependencies* (`demarneffe-2021`, CC BY 4.0).
- Wisniewski, G. 2019, *Combien d'exemples de tests sont-ils nécessaires à une évaluation fiable ?* (`wisniewski-2019`, CC BY 4.0).
- Grouin, C. 2022, *Impact du français inclusif sur les outils du TAL* (`grouin-2022`, CC BY 4.0).
- Missud et al. 2020, VerNom (`missud-2020`); Sanacore et al. 2019 (`sanacore-2019`).
- Counts: UD 2.18 French GSD (`fr_gsd-ud-{train,dev,test}.conllu`), ParisStories, Rhapsodie, Sequoia, ud-treebanks-v2.18, counted 2026-11-06 with `awk`.
- Mova: `en/src/main.rs` (`xpos_fill`, `xpos_of`), baselines in [What every language gets](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/PACKAGE/).
- [← previous 09. Old, Middle and Classical French, and the literary tenses](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/09-old-middle-classical-french/)
- [next → 11. Nouns](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/11-nouns/)
- [↑ back to Modern Standard French (fr) — a reference manual for Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/)