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# 20. Syntax overview

**On this page**

1. [1. The chapters of the syntax part](#1-the-chapters-of-the-syntax-part)
2. [2. The French clause in one page](#2-the-french-clause-in-one-page)
3. [3. Dependency grammar and the CoNLL-U record](#3-dependency-grammar-and-the-conll-u-record)
4. [4. Word classes in brief](#4-word-classes-in-brief)
5. [5. The French relation inventory](#5-the-french-relation-inventory)
6. [6. French subtypes](#6-french-subtypes)
7. [7. Design decisions that shape every French tree](#7-design-decisions-that-shape-every-french-tree)
8. [8. The treebanks and how they differ](#8-the-treebanks-and-how-they-differ)
9. [9. UD, SUD and the history of the GSD annotation](#9-ud-sud-and-the-history-of-the-gsd-annotation)
10. [10. Order, projectivity and the clitics](#10-order-projectivity-and-the-clitics)
11. [11. Written and spoken French in the numbers](#11-written-and-spoken-french-in-the-numbers)
12. [12. How Mova handles it](#12-how-mova-handles-it)
13. [13. Sources](#13-sources)

French builds a clause around a finite verb that almost always has an expressed subject, in the order subject – verb – object, with the pronoun objects and the negative particle *ne* packed in front of the verb as clitics, with most adjectives after the noun, and with prepositions and articles in front of every noun phrase. Case is not marked on nouns, so the order and the little words carry the grammar. Around this core, the spoken language uses a second system that moves phrases out of the clause (dislocation, clefts) and fills it with markers of speech. This chapter is the entry to the syntax part of the manual. It gives a map of the part, a one-page account of the French clause, the way a French sentence is written down as a Universal Dependencies (UD) tree, the French relation inventory with counts, the places where the French treebanks disagree, and what Mova's parser does with French today.

Contents:

1. The chapters of the syntax part
2. The French clause in one page
3. Dependency grammar and the CoNLL-U record
4. Word classes in brief
5. The French relation inventory
6. French subtypes
7. Design decisions that shape every French tree
8. The treebanks and how they differ
9. UD, SUD and the history of the GSD annotation
10. Order, projectivity and the clitics
11. Written and spoken French in the numbers
12. How Mova handles it
13. Sources

---

## 1. The chapters of the syntax part

| chapter | file | what it covers |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 20 | this chapter | the clause, the tree format, the relations, the treebanks |
| 21 | [21. Clause structure](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/21-clause-structure/) | subjects (including impersonal *il* and the doubled subject of speech), objects, attributes, the place of the clitics in the clause |
| 22 | [22. Phrases](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/22-phrases/) | noun, adjective, adverb and prepositional phrases; the place of determiners and adjectives |
| 23 | [23. Complementation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/23-complementation/) | what verbs, nouns and adjectives take: *à* and *de* complements, infinitives, *que*-clauses, causatives, raising and control |
| 24 | [24. Coordination and subordination](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/24-coordination-subordination/) | coordination, subordinating conjunctions, mood selection, the subjunctive, the sequence of tenses, *si* clauses |
| 25 | [25. Relative clauses](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/25-relative-clauses/) | *qui, que, dont, où, lequel*, relatives after a preposition, relatives in speech |
| 26 | [26. Questions](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/26-questions/) | yes/no and wh-questions, inversion, *est-ce que*, questions in place, indirect questions |
| 27 | [27. Negation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/27-negation/) | *ne … pas* and its family, *ne* dropping, negative words, *ne … que*, expletive *ne*, scope |
| 28 | [28. Voice and the passive](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/28-voice-and-passive/) | the passive, the *se*-passive, *on*, impersonal passives, causatives |
| 29 | [29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/29-ellipsis-word-order-information-structure/) | dislocation, clefts, pseudo-clefts, presentatives, ellipsis |

The forms the syntax works on (pronouns, determiners, verbs, auxiliaries, participles) are in the morphology part; the meaning and use of the sentences in the pragmatics part. Each chapter of this part ends with a section **How Mova handles it**, which says what Mova's tools do with the point and where they stop. Mova's French is much smaller than Mova's English: there is no French tokenizer, lexicon or morphology, and the pragmatics reads English words. The sections say so, construction by construction.

## 2. The French clause in one page

**The basic order.** A declarative clause is subject – verb – object: *Le chat mange la souris.* The subject is nearly always expressed. French is not a pro-drop language: an empty subject is replaced by an empty *il* (*Il pleut*), and in the spoken language even a noun subject is usually repeated by a pronoun before the verb (*Mon frère, il est parti*). A noun subject comes after the verb only in a few set frames: in inserted speech (*dit-il*), after some adverbs, in relative clauses, and in the stylistic inversion of written narrative (chapter 29).

**The verb group.** The finite verb is preceded by a string of clitics in a fixed order — *ne*, subject pronoun, object pronouns, *y*, *en* — and followed by *pas* or another negative word. Compound tenses and the passive put an auxiliary before the participle; the negation surrounds the auxiliary (*Je n'ai pas vu*), and short adverbs sit between auxiliary and participle (*Il a bien mangé*). Modal and aspectual verbs take a bare infinitive (*Il veut partir*), others take *à* or *de* before it (*Il commence à parler, Il décide de partir*).

**The noun phrase.** Determiner – (short adjective) – noun – (adjective) – prepositional complement – relative clause. The determiner is obligatory for a singular count noun. Adjectives follow the noun unless they belong to a short list of frequent ones (*grand, petit, bon, nouveau, premier …*). A noun complement is introduced by a preposition (*le livre de Paul*); there is no stacking of nouns as in English.

**Prepositions.** The preposition is the head word of an oblique phrase in traditional analysis and a dependent in UD. *À* and *de* are the two most frequent words of the grammar after the article, and they merge with *le* and *les* into *au, aux, du, des*.

**Subordination.** A subordinate clause is introduced by *que*, by a relative pronoun, by *si*, or by a conjunction; the introducing word is never omitted. The mood of the subordinate verb depends on the governing word. A subject that is the same as the main subject is expressed by an infinitive instead of a finite clause (*Je veux partir*, not **Je veux que je parte*).

**Questions and negation.** Questions are formed by intonation, by *est-ce que*, or by inversion of a subject pronoun; wh-words are placed in front or left in place. Negation has two parts around the verb, of which the first (*ne*) is mostly dropped in speech.

**Information structure.** Because a stressed word is not enough, French marks topic and focus by construction. A topic is placed outside the clause and taken up by a pronoun (*Cette épreuve, tu la fais*); a focus is isolated by a cleft (*C'est Marie qui a pris le livre*). A dislocation, a cleft or an *il y a* … *qui* presentative occurs in 14.6% of the sentences of the spoken ParisStories and 11.0% of Rhapsodie, against 1.8% in the written GSD (2026-11-06; chapter 29).

**What French does not have.** It has no case on nouns, no phrasal verbs, no dative shift (**Il donne sa sœur le livre*), no stranded prepositions (**la femme que je parle à*), no *do*-support and no free subject-verb inversion. None of this is a matter of tags: an English model, which expects an English order and English function words, cannot be used on French as it is, so Mova retrains its parser on French trees (§12).

## 3. Dependency grammar and the CoNLL-U record

UD represents a sentence as a tree of **words**. Each word depends on exactly one other word, its head, through a labelled relation, and one word, the root, depends on none. The unit is the **syntactic word**, which can differ from the written word. The tree is stored in the CoNLL-U format, one line per word with ten tab-separated columns: `ID`, `FORM`, `LEMMA`, `UPOS`, `XPOS`, `FEATS`, `HEAD`, `DEPREL`, `DEPS`, `MISC`.

Here is a sentence of UD French GSD with its record (the `DEPS` column is empty in every French treebank of the release, and `XPOS` is empty in all of them except PUD, ALTS and ParTUT, which carry a tag set of their own; the table leaves both out):

> **fr-ud-dev_00007** · UD French GSD Elle lutte pour échapper aux tueurs à ses trousses. *she fights for escape-INF to-the killers at her heels* — "She is fighting to escape the killers on her heels."

| ID | FORM | LEMMA | UPOS | FEATS | HEAD | DEPREL | MISC |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | Elle | lui | PRON | Case=Nom\|Emph=No\|Gender=Fem\|Number=Sing\|Person=3\|PronType=Prs | 2 | nsubj | wordform=elle |
| 2 | lutte | lutter | VERB | Mood=Ind\|Number=Sing\|Person=3\|Tense=Pres\|VerbForm=Fin | 0 | root |  |
| 3 | pour | pour | ADP |  | 4 | mark |  |
| 4 | échapper | échapper | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 2 | advcl | Subject=SubjRaising |
| 5–6 | aux |  |  |  |  |  | (multiword token) |
| 5 | à | à | ADP |  | 7 | case |  |
| 6 | les | le | DET | Definite=Def\|Number=Plur\|PronType=Art | 7 | det |  |
| 7 | tueurs | tueur | NOUN | Gender=Masc\|Number=Plur | 4 | obl:arg | Exponence[Gender]=Inherent |
| 8 | à | à | ADP |  | 10 | case |  |
| 9 | ses | son | DET | Number=Plur\|Number[psor]=Sing\|Person[psor]=3\|Poss=Yes\|PronType=Prs | 10 | det |  |
| 10 | trousses | trousses | NOUN | Gender=Fem\|Number=Plur | 4 | obl:mod | SpaceAfter=No |
| 11 | . | . | PUNCT |  | 2 | punct |  |

Four things in this record are typical of French.

**Multiword tokens.** The written words *au, aux, du, des* (and the rarer *auquel, duquel, auxquels, desquelles*) are each two syntactic words: a preposition and an article. Line `5-6` holds the written form, lines 5 and 6 the words. In UD French GSD (all three files, counted 2026-11-06) there are 11 022 multiword tokens: *du* 4 390, *des* 3 298, *au* 2 477, *aux* 808, and 49 others. Because *des* is also the plural indefinite article (*des enfants*), only the contracted *des* = *de* + *les* is split: the indefinite one stays a single `DET`.

**Elision and hyphens.** An elided word is a word of its own (*l'*, *qu'*, *n'*, *jusqu'*), whose lemma is the full word (*le, que, ne, jusque*). In inversion the subject pronoun is cut off from its verb and keeps its hyphen (*-t-il*, *-vous*). In the written text there is no space between them; the tree has two words, with `SpaceAfter=No` on the first.

**The lemma of personal pronouns.** The lemma column of the GSD conflates the personal pronouns: *il, elle* and *le* all have the lemma *lui* (as in line 1 above, with the original form kept in `wordform`), *je* and *me* have *moi*, *se* has *soi*. Counts by lemma are therefore counts of groups. The forms are reliable.

**Features.** French nouns carry `Gender` and `Number`, adjectives and participles also `Gender` and `Number` (agreement), finite verbs `Mood, Tense, Person, Number`, articles `Definite`, `PronType=Art`, pronouns `Case` (nominative, accusative, dative: clitics only) and `Emph` (clitic or strong form). The MISC feature `Exponence[Gender]=Inherent` marks gender as a property of the noun; on agreeing words it is not marked. The `Subject=` attribute (§7) records how the subject of a non-finite verb is found.

## 4. Word classes in brief

UD uses 17 universal parts of speech. The figures are those of UD French GSD (400 385 words, counted 2026-11-06):

| UPOS | words | share | French notes |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| NOUN | 75 330 | 18.8% | gender is lexical; the article carries the plural in speech |
| ADP | 63 543 | 15.9% | *de* and *à* alone are two thirds of them (41 932 of 63 543) |
| DET | 61 098 | 15.3% | articles, possessives, demonstratives, quantifiers, interrogative *quel* |
| PUNCT | 44 005 | 11.0% |  |
| VERB | 31 769 | 7.9% |  |
| PROPN | 27 693 | 6.9% |  |
| ADJ | 23 820 | 5.9% |  |
| PRON | 17 687 | 4.4% | clitics and strong pronouns, relatives, interrogatives |
| ADV | 14 501 | 3.6% | *ne, pas, plus, très, aussi, où* (as a relative adverb) … |
| AUX | 13 081 | 3.3% | only *être, avoir* and causative *faire* |
| CCONJ | 10 634 | 2.7% |  |
| NUM | 10 479 | 2.6% |  |
| SCONJ | 2 983 | 0.7% | *que, si, comme, quand, lorsque* … |
| X | 2 957 | 0.7% | foreign words |
| SYM, INTJ | 718, 87 | 0.2%, 0.02% |  |

Three decisions of the French UD are worth knowing here. **Auxiliaries are three verbs only:** *être* and *avoir* in compound tenses and the passive, and *faire* in the causative (GSD changelog, version 2.1). Modals (*pouvoir, devoir, vouloir*) and the verbs of future and immediate past (*aller, venir de*) are full verbs with an `xcomp`. **A copula is only *être*.** Other linking verbs (*devenir, rester, sembler, paraître*) take an `xcomp` predicate. **The article and the preposition are separate words**, so a prepositional phrase has three layers: *aux tueurs* = `case` *à* + `det` *les* + the noun.

The spoken treebanks differ in one more point: in the written GSD the interjection class is almost empty (87 words), whereas the spoken Rhapsodie marks 207 sentences whose root is an interjection (*oui, ouais, non, ah*).

## 5. The French relation inventory

The UD relations fall into the core arguments (subject, object), the oblique and nominal dependents, the clausal dependents, the function words, and the special relations. The table gives, for each universal relation used, its function in French and the counts in UD French GSD (all three files, 400 385 words, 2026-11-06) and, per 10 000 words, in three other treebanks. Subtypes are folded into their universal relation in this table and listed in §6.

| relation | what it links in French | GSD | per 10 000 words: GSD / ParisStories / Rhapsodie / Sequoia |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| `root` | the head of the sentence (a verb in 73% of GSD sentences) | 16 342 | 408 / 649 / 725 / 439 |
| `nsubj` | subject, noun or pronoun, before the verb | 22 798 | 569 / 938 / 804 / 495 |
| `csubj` | clausal subject (*Qu'il parte m'étonne*) | 224 | 6 / 4 / 4 / 9 |
| `obj` | direct object, including the clitics *le, la, les, me, te* | 13 596 | 340 / 437 / 394 / 314 |
| `iobj` | indirect object; in French GSD **only a pronoun** (*lui, leur, y, en, me*) | 894 | 22 / 84 / 43 / 19 |
| `obl` | a noun or pronoun with a preposition, in the clause | 25 874 | 646 / 361 / 428 / 602 |
| `ccomp` | complement clause with its own subject (*dire que …*) | 1 435 | 36 / 114 / 81 / 66 |
| `xcomp` | non-finite complement, controlled or raised (*vouloir partir*), and the predicate of a linking verb (*devenir célèbre*) | 4 474 | 112 / 126 / 124 / 125 |
| `advcl` | adverbial clause | 3 527 | 88 / 110 / 100 / 81 |
| `acl` | clause that modifies a noun, relative or not | 8 100 | 202 / 105 / 154 / 225 |
| `advmod` | adverb | 14 330 | 358 / 604 / 571 / 361 |
| `nmod` | a noun modified by a prepositional phrase or by a noun (*le livre de Paul*) | 35 582 | 889 / 197 / 328 / 1 044 |
| `amod` | adjective modifying a noun | 20 060 | 501 / 151 / 229 / 539 |
| `nummod` | numeral modifying a noun | 3 640 | 91 / 37 / 32 / 129 |
| `appos` | apposition | 6 327 | 158 / 19 / 31 / 72 |
| `det` | article, possessive, demonstrative, quantifier determiner | 60 661 | 1 515 / 751 / 933 / 1 466 |
| `case` | preposition on its noun | 57 917 | 1 447 / 607 / 791 / 1 466 |
| `mark` | subordinating conjunction or *de/à* before an infinitive | 6 728 | 168 / 289 / 248 / 207 |
| `cc` | coordinating conjunction | 10 833 | 271 / 339 / 250 / 237 |
| `conj` | the second and later conjuncts | 14 243 | 356 / 181 / 168 / 296 |
| `cop` | *être* before its predicate | 5 560 | 139 / 229 / 197 / 82 |
| `aux` | *avoir, être, faire* (all subtypes) | 7 498 | 187 / 265 / 149 / 247 |
| `expl` | the empty or reflexive clitic (all subtypes) | 2 845 | 71 / 164 / 172 / 82 |
| `fixed` | the words of a frozen expression (*en effet, afin de, c'est-à-dire*) | 3 243 | 81 / 173 / 148 / 80 |
| `flat` | proper names and foreign words | 8 096 | 202 / 13 / 60 / 134 |
| `parataxis` | juxtaposed clause | 1 116 | 28 / 11 / 13 / 41 |
| `orphan` | the remnant of an elided predicate | 208 | 5 / 0 / 1 / 6 |
| `dislocated` | a phrase outside the clause | 75 | 2 / 83 / 57 / 2 |
| `discourse` | discourse marker, interjection | 49 | 1 / 759 / 434 / 0 |
| `reparandum` | the discarded part of a self-repair | 0 | 0 / 242 / 272 / 0 |
| `punct` | punctuation | 44 005 | 1 099 / 1 913 / 1 994 / 1 115 |
| `vocative`, `dep`, `goeswith`, `compound` | residual | 15, 46, 38, 6 | `dep`: 1 / 41 / 44 / 11 |

Values for `aux`, `expl`, `flat`, `acl`, `obl` and `nsubj` add the subtypes in §6.

These numbers show the shape of written French: a long noun phrase (`det`, `case`, `nmod` and `amod` are 44% of all relations), few clauses per sentence (24.5 words per sentence, and one clausal dependent — `advcl`, `ccomp`, `acl`, `xcomp`, `csubj` — for about every 22 words), and one root verb for three sentences in four. The spoken treebanks show the opposite: more subjects and more adverbs per word, almost no `nmod`, `appos` or `flat:name`, and a large layer of `discourse`, `reparandum`, `expl:comp` and `dislocated:subj`.

## 6. French subtypes

UD allows language-specific subtypes after a colon. French GSD uses the following; the counts are for the whole treebank (2026-11-06).

| subtype | use | count |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `nsubj:pass`, `csubj:pass` | subject of a passive | 3 663, 26 |
| `nsubj:caus` | the subject of causative *faire* (the causer), attached to the infinitive, which heads the clause | 132 |
| `obj:agent`, `iobj:agent` | the causee (the one made to act), as an object or an indirect object of the infinitive | 111, 24 |
| `obj:lvc` | the object of a light-verb construction (*avoir lieu, faire partie*) | 554 |
| `obl:agent` | the agent of a passive (*par*, *de*) | 1 554 |
| `obl:arg` | a prepositional argument of a verb or adjective (*participer à, parler de*) | 8 901 |
| `obl:mod` | a prepositional modifier (adjunct) | 15 399 |
| `aux:tense` | *avoir, être* in a compound tense | 3 837 |
| `aux:pass` | *être* in a passive | 3 401 |
| `aux:caus` | *faire* in a causative | 250 |
| `expl:subj` | the empty *il*, the *ce* of a cleft | 931 |
| `expl:comp` | the *y* and *en* of *il y a, s'en aller, en être* | 211 |
| `expl:pv` | the *se* of an inherent pronominal verb (*s'agir, se souvenir*) | 1 017 |
| `expl:pass` | the *se* of a reflexive passive (*se vend*) | 686 |
| `acl:relcl` | relative clause | 3 240 |
| `advcl:cleft` | the clause of a cleft | 212 |
| `flat:name`, `flat:foreign` | proper name, foreign phrase | 7 005, 1 075 |
| `dislocated:subj`, `dislocated:obj`, `dislocated:mod` | dislocated phrases (rare in GSD) | 19, 5, 1 |
| `parataxis:insert` | an inserted clause | 183 |
| `dep:comp` | residual | 15 |

The **ParisStories** and **Rhapsodie** treebanks add `dislocated:subj` (302 and 203) and `dislocated:obj` (34 and 21), and `parataxis:parenth` and `parataxis:obj` for speech.

## 7. Design decisions that shape every French tree

The following decisions determine the shape of a French tree. They are those of UD in general, and where the French treebanks go their own way they are marked.

**Content words are heads.** The head of a clause is its lexical predicate; auxiliaries, the copula, prepositions, articles and subordinating conjunctions are leaves. *Je n'ai pas compris*: *compris* is the head; *ai* is `aux:tense`, *n'* and *pas* are `advmod`, *Je* is `nsubj`. *Il est grand*: *grand* is the head, *est* is `cop`. *Dans la maison*: *maison* is the head, *dans* is `case`, *la* is `det`.

**Oblique phrases are split into argument and modifier.** The French GSD distinguishes an `obl:arg` (the prepositional phrase is required by the verb or adjective: *participer **à** un projet, parler **de** politique, naître **à** Paris*) from an `obl:mod` (it is an adjunct: *travailler **à** Paris*, *en 1995*). The distinction was introduced in 2018 and applied by hand to preposition phrases with *à*, *de*, *par*, *dans*, *avec* first (GSD changelog); the rest of the treebank was converted by rule. The difference is a matter of valency and is treated in chapter 23. A nominal indirect object (*donner un livre **à Marie***) is therefore `obl:arg`, never `iobj`.

**The reflexive and expletive clitics are `expl`.** The empty *il* (*Il pleut, Il faut partir*), the demonstrative *ce* of a cleft or of a copular sentence (*C'est difficile*), the *se* of a pronominal verb (*Il se souvient*), the *se* of a middle or passive (*Cela se vend bien*) and the *y* and *en* that are part of a verb idiom (*il y a, s'en aller*) are not arguments. They are `expl` with four subtypes (`subj, pv, pass, comp`), introduced in version 2.5 (2019).

**Causative *faire* is an auxiliary and its infinitive is the head.** In *Pathé fait monter une usine* (fr-ud-dev_00214) the head is *monter*; *fait* is `aux:caus`; *usine* is the `obj` of *monter*; and *Pathé*, the subject of *fait*, is attached to *monter* as `nsubj:caus`. The person made to act, when expressed, is `obj:agent` or `iobj:agent` (*Il fait chanter les enfants*, *Il fait lire le livre aux enfants*; chapter 23). *Laisser* and the verbs of perception are not auxiliaries: *laisser filer le ballon* has *filer* as an `xcomp` of *laisser* (fr-ud-dev_00051). The treebank is nearly consistent here: *faire* is `aux:caus` 250 times, and an infinitive is an `xcomp` of *faire* only 9 times (2026-11-06).

**Subjects of non-finite verbs are recorded in MISC.** French GSD has an attribute `Subject=` on the non-finite or participial verb that says where its subject comes from: `SubjRaising` (the subject of the governing verb), `ObjRaising` (its object), `OblRaising` (its prepositional object), `Generic` (an arbitrary subject), `Instantiated` (a subject expressed elsewhere in the sentence); ParisStories and Rhapsodie add `NoRaising`. It occurs 6 765 times in GSD, 3 892 of them `SubjRaising` (e.g. *échapper* in the table above), 343 `ObjRaising` and 251 `OblRaising`. The labels are the annotators' own; the values given here are our reading from examples. The attribute is the only record in the tree of what is called control and raising in chapter 23.

**Multiword expressions.** Frozen sequences are `fixed` (*en effet, afin de, dès lors, c'est-à-dire*), 3 243 words in GSD; light-verb constructions are `obj:lvc` (*avoir lieu, mettre fin*); idioms are marked in MISC (`InIdiom`, `Idiom`: 3 246 and 2 671 in GSD) without changing the tree.

**Names and foreign phrases are flat.** *Marie Curie* is `flat:name` with the first name as head; 7 005 in GSD, only 31 in the spoken ParisStories.

**Ellipsis is `orphan`.** In *Il a le pitjantjatjara comme langue maternelle et l'anglais comme seconde langue* (fr-ud-dev_00393) the second conjunct has no verb: *anglais* is promoted to `conj` and *langue* is its `orphan`. 208 in GSD; 201 under `conj`.

**Non-projectivity.** Crossing arcs are allowed. They are discussed in §10.

## 8. The treebanks and how they differ

The UD 2.18 release holds nine treebanks of French or of a regional language of France that the manual uses (counts from the files, 2026-11-06). They fall into the **written** ones (GSD, Sequoia, PUD, ParTUT, FQB), a treebank of **sixteenth-century legal French** (ALTS), a treebank of a **regional language**, Poitevin-Saintongeais (PoitevinDIVITAL, counted here only for completeness), and the **spoken** ones (ParisStories, Rhapsodie). The Old and Middle French treebanks of the release are not treated.

| treebank | licence | sentences | words | mean length | genre | what is special |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| GSD | CC BY-SA 4.0 | 16 342 | 400 385 | 24.5 | web, news, Wikipedia, reviews (shuffled, source unknown) | the largest; maintained in SUD and converted; `Subject=` and idiom attributes |
| Sequoia | LGPL-LR | 3 099 | 70 545 | 22.8 | Europarl, regional press, medical, Wikipedia | maintained in SUD and converted since 2023; same subtypes as GSD |
| PUD | CC BY-SA 3.0 | 1 000 | 24 726 | 24.7 | parallel Wikipedia/news sentences | `obl` without subtypes (1 422 `obl`); XPOS filled |
| ParTUT | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | 1 020 | 28 580 | 28.0 | talks, legal texts, Wikipedia | part of a parallel treebank; non-commercial: tests only |
| FQB | LGPL-LR | 2 289 | 23 896 | 10.4 | a corpus entirely made of questions | a converted French QuestionBank; 97% of the sentences end in a question mark |
| ALTS | CC BY-SA 4.0 | 2 026 | 68 088 | 33.6 | sixteenth-century legal French (Guernsey trial accounts 1563–69; Terrien, *Commentaires*, 1578) | an older state of the language and an older annotation: plain `obl`, `expl` and `aux`, no `nsubj:pass`; 17.5% non-projective |
| PoitevinDIVITAL | CC BY-SA 4.0 | 239 | 5 484 | 22.9 | Poitevin-Saintongeais, several genres | a regional language, glossed in French; not used for French counts |
| ParisStories | CC BY-SA 4.0 | 2 776 | 42 789 | 15.4 | monologues and dialogues of speakers of the Paris region, recorded and transcribed by students (2017–2021) | `Liaison` features; `discourse`, `reparandum`, `dislocated:*` |
| Rhapsodie | CC BY-SA 4.0 | 3 209 | 44 234 | 13.8 | spoken French, monologues and dialogues (3 h 10 min of audio) | a prosodic layer in the SUD version; `NoRaising` |

The disagreements are real and they matter for any tool trained on more than one treebank. We found these:

**1. Subtypes.** GSD, Sequoia, ParisStories and Rhapsodie subtype `obl` into `obl:arg`, `obl:mod`, `obl:agent`; PUD and ALTS do not (PUD has 1 422 plain `obl`, ALTS 5 521). ALTS has plain `expl` (623) and plain `aux` (977), keeping only `aux:pass` (846); it has no `obj:lvc`, and its passive subject is a plain `nsubj` (there is no `nsubj:pass` in it).

**2. *C'est*.** In GSD the *c'* of *c'est* is `nsubj` 350 times and `expl:subj` 187 times; in ParisStories it is `nsubj` 607 times and `expl:subj` only 33. The second treebank treats *c'est* as an ordinary copular clause with a demonstrative subject, the first reserves `expl:subj` for the cleft frame. The consequence is that a model trained on both learns a blurred boundary between a subject and an expletive.

**3. Negative words.** GSD marks *jamais* with `Polarity=Neg` (86 times); ParisStories and Rhapsodie mark it with `PronType=Neg` (24 and 26 times) and give it no `Polarity`. *Pas* is `Polarity=Neg` in all four.

**4. Questions.** FQB analyses the noun phrase after *Qu'est-ce que* as `dislocated` (139 times in 2 289 sentences) where GSD makes the sentence a cleft. See chapter 26.

**5. The root.** 73% of GSD sentences have a verb as root (11 969 of 16 342), 67% in ParisStories (1 869 of 2 776), 59% in Rhapsodie (1 881 of 3 209): the remainder are nominal sentences, adjective sentences and, in speech, interjections.

**6. Multiword tokens.** All the treebanks split *au, du, des*; GSD and ParisStories split *-t-il* and *-ce* from the verb, ParisStories adds `Liaison` features to its words.

The advice is the same as in the other manuals: keep one treebank's conventions when training, convert before mixing. Adding the four open spoken and written training sets to GSD did not change the LAS on GSD (§12), which is some evidence of the conflict.

## 9. UD, SUD and the history of the GSD annotation

The French treebanks have been maintained next to a second annotation scheme, **SUD** (Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies). SUD is near-isomorphic to UD; the main difference is that it takes functional heads: the auxiliary heads the participle, the copula heads the predicate, the preposition heads the noun (gerdes-2018). In SUD *Je n'ai pas compris* has *ai* as head and *compris* as its `comp:aux`; in UD it is the opposite. UD French GSD is **maintained in SUD and converted automatically to UD** since version 2.6 (2020, Grew rules, GSD README). A tool that reads the UD files therefore reads converted trees, and conversion artefacts exist (such as the `Subject=` attribute, which is a SUD-side annotation exported into MISC).

The history of GSD in six lines, from its changelog:

- **1.0–1.4 (2015–2016):** initial conversion of the Google treebank (a content-head conversion of the 2013 universal treebank); lemmas, features and the completion of truncated sentences (Wikipedia sentences had been cut).
- **2.0 (2017):** conversion to the new guidelines; manual annotation of the `nmod` / `obl` distinction in ambiguous cases.
- **2.1 (2017):** only *être, avoir, faire* are `AUX`; harmonisation across French treebanks of the causative, the copula and the auxiliary; possessive determiners become `det`.
- **2.2–2.3 (2018):** `obl` split into `obl:agent`, `obl:mod`, `obl:arg` (done by hand for 43.5% of the cases at first); subtyping of *à*.
- **2.5 (2019):** `expl:subj, expl:comp, expl:pass`; `aux` → `aux:tense`; a systematic review of non-projective trees; improved ellipsis.
- **2.6–2.7 (2020):** maintained in SUD, converted.

The effort to bring the French treebanks closer to the UD guidelines and to make them internally consistent is described in the paper that accompanies these changes (guillaume-2019): a conversion with rules, validated and measured on both consistency and closeness to the guidelines. The scheme as a whole, its history and its principles are in (demarneffe-2021). For spoken French, where the question of what a "sentence" and what "punctuation" are is harder, the guidelines used by Rhapsodie and the SUD spoken treebanks are given by (kahane-2021), and the recent format of Rhapsodie that joins the syntactic tree with a prosodic layer is in (garcia-2025).

## 10. Order, projectivity and the clitics

A dependency tree is **projective** if no two arcs cross when drawn above the sentence. A projective tree always corresponds to a continuous phrase-structure; a crossing arc is a discontinuity. French is almost projective. In the UD files (2026-11-06, arcs to punctuation ignored) the share of sentences with at least one crossing is:

| treebank | non-projective sentences |
| --- | --- |
| FQB | 32 of 2 289 (1.4%) |
| PUD | 19 of 1 000 (1.9%) |
| Sequoia | 72 of 3 099 (2.3%) |
| GSD | 674 of 16 342 (4.1%) |
| ParisStories | 161 of 2 776 (5.8%) |
| Rhapsodie | 202 of 3 209 (6.3%) |
| ALTS (16th-century legal French) | 355 of 2 026 (17.5%) |

A study of non-projective dependencies in the French treebanks (perrier-2021) finds four linguistic sources that together explain 97% of the crossings: **clitic climbing** (the object clitic stands before the auxiliary or the governing verb, not before the verb of which it is an argument: *Il **en** a pris trois* with *en* depending on *trois*, or *Il **lui** a permis de partir*), **deep extraction** (a relative or interrogative pronoun separated from the verb that governs it), **minimisation of dependency length** (heavy phrases moved to the end), and **pairs of distant dependent words** (for instance *ne … que*). The same study shows that the choice of scheme changes the count: in SUD, where the auxiliary heads the participle, a clitic before the auxiliary crosses the arcs of the subject and the adverbs, and there are two and a half times as many non-projective nodes as in UD (perrier-2021). In UD the same clitic does not cross, since both depend on the participle.

In practice this means that a left-to-right shift-reduce parser, which builds projective trees, loses the clitic arcs of the 4% of GSD sentences that have a crossing, and the whole of a ParisStories sentence in about 6%. Mova's parser is of that kind (§12).

**Clitic climbing in history.** The order of the Modern French clitics (all before the finite verb, none before the infinitive of a restructuring verb) is a late state. Old and Middle French had obligatory climbing and interpolation between the clitic and the verb; climbing was lost before the beginning of the 19th century (olivier-2023). The modern order, in which every clitic is verb-adjacent and proclitic, is discussed in the pronouns chapter; here it matters that it is a reason for the crossings above.

## 11. Written and spoken French in the numbers

The spoken treebanks and the written ones are, for syntax, two samples of the same language with different frequencies. These ratios (2026-11-06) show it.

| per 10 000 words | GSD (written) | ParisStories (spoken) | Rhapsodie (spoken) |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| subjects (`nsubj`, all subtypes) | 569 | 938 | 804 |
| subject *on* (and *l'on*) | 15 | 173 | 66 |
| subject *je/j'* | 13 | 253 | 165 |
| noun or name as `nsubj` | 263 | 32 | 92 |
| `det` | 1 515 | 751 | 933 |
| `nmod` | 889 | 197 | 328 |
| `advmod` | 358 | 604 | 571 |
| `cop` | 139 | 229 | 197 |
| `aux:pass` | 85 | 25 | 30 |
| `acl:relcl` | 81 | 72 | 115 |
| `expl:comp` (*il y a*) | 5 | 57 | 51 |
| `dislocated:subj` | 0 | 71 | 46 |
| `discourse` | 1 | 759 | 434 |

The spoken French clause has almost no noun subject (32 per 10 000 words against 263 in the written corpus: 3.5% of the plain `nsubj` in ParisStories, 12% in Rhapsodie, 55% in GSD) and is made of pronouns; it has few nominal modifiers and many adverbs and discourse markers; it uses *il y a* about thirteen times as often per word as the written text (212 in ParisStories, 3.7 per 10 000 words in GSD against 49.5). The tools of the written language need to be rebuilt for it. The tables of the next chapters repeat these two columns for each construction.

## 12. How Mova handles it

**What is done.** French is read by the English tree parser (`en`) after the treebank's tags have been mapped to the tag set the parser knows (`en xpos-fill`, in [`en/src/main.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/en/), function `xpos_of`). The mapping gives each word a Penn tag from its UPOS and FEATS: `NOUN` → `NN/NNS`, `ADP`/`SCONJ` → `IN`, a verb form by `VerbForm` and `Tense`, `PRON` → `PRP` (relative or interrogative `WP`), `DET` → `DT` (possessive `PRP$`, interrogative `WDT`), `ADV` → `RB` (interrogative `WRB`), `CCONJ` → `CC`. Mood, case, gender and the difference between a clitic and a strong form are lost in the tag. Mova's relation enum ([`en/src/gram.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/en/)) has only the **English** subtypes: a French label that is not in it falls back to its universal relation. So `expl:subj`, `expl:pv`, `expl:pass`, `expl:comp` are all `expl`; `obl:arg` and `obl:mod` are both `obl`; `aux:tense` is `aux`; `nsubj:caus` is `nsubj`; `advcl:cleft` is `advcl`; `flat:name` is `flat`; while `nsubj:pass`, `obl:agent`, `aux:pass` and `acl:relcl` are kept. **The parser therefore cannot tell an expletive subject from a reflexive clitic, or an argument from an adjunct.** Wherever this manual says that the parser learns a French relation, it learns the universal one.

**Measured.** On UD French GSD (UD 2.18, train → dev, 2026-10-22) the baseline is LAS 87.00 with the parser's own tags and 89.78 with the treebank's gold tags (UAS 91.08 and 92.59); the tagger reaches 96.47% on the dev set, 84.8% on words unseen in training (7.2% of tokens). Training on the four other open training sets as well (Sequoia, ALTS, Rhapsodie, ParisStories) gave 87.02 and 89.83, no gain on the written dev set. Both numbers are on the **gold tokenization**.

**The tokenizer is the limit.** The `en` tokenizer is the English finite automaton, with a small dictionary learned from the training file (69 abbreviations, 1 994 hyphenated words kept whole, 5 apostrophe forms). On raw French text (`en tok-eval`, train on GSD train, test on GSD dev, 2026-11-06) it matches the treebank's tokens exactly in 26.1% of the 1 476 sentences (token precision 92.19, recall 85.72, F1 88.84): it keeps the elided clitic joined to the next word (*l'obscurité, n'ai, qu'il, c'est, jusqu'alors, vas-tu*) and does not split *au, aux, du, des* into preposition and article. Parsing raw French therefore starts from a wrong token sequence in three sentences out of four, and the 87.00 does not apply.

**What the parser does with raw French.** The results below are from `en explain`, which trains the parser on the GSD training file (12 epochs, beam 8, CPU, 2026-11-06) and parses sentences given as raw text through the English tokenizer. It is a trace of the model, not a score, and the sentences were chosen by us to show the constructions of this part; the same trace is used in the following chapters. Labels are those Mova can produce (the French subtypes are folded, as explained above). The first block is parsed correctly or nearly so, the second shows where it fails.

| input (raw) | what Mova gives |
| --- | --- |
| *Je ne sais pas.* | right: *Je* `nsubj`, *ne* and *pas* `advmod` of *sais* |
| *Il y a personne.* | right in the folded labels: *Il* `expl`, *y* `expl`, *personne* `obj` of *a* |
| *Il faut que tu viennes.* | right: *Il* `expl`, *viennes* `ccomp` of *faut*, *que* `mark`, *tu* `nsubj` |
| *Le livre que je lis est ancien.* | right: *livre* `nsubj`, *lis* `acl:relcl`, *que* `obj`, *est* `cop` |
| *Le livre a été écrit par Marie.* | right: *livre* `nsubj:pass`, *a* `aux`, *été* `aux:pass`, *Marie* `obl` with *par* `case` |
| *Je lui ai donné le livre.* | right: *lui* `iobj`, *ai* `aux`, *livre* `obj` |
| *Je n'ai rien vu.* | wrong: *n'ai* is one token and becomes the root; *rien* is its `obj`, *vu* an `acl` of *rien* |
| *Est-ce que tu viens ?* | half right: *viens* is the root with *tu* `nsubj` and *que* `mark`, but *Est-ce* is one token and an `obl` of it (GSD: *est* `cop`, *-ce* `expl:subj`, and the question marker is not one word) |
| *Tu vas où ?* | wrong: *Tu* is the root, *vas* `flat`, *où* `punct` |
| *Si tu viens, je serai content.* | wrong: *serai* is an `acl:relcl` of *tu*, *viens* an `amod`; the condition is not found |
| *Il est arrivé un accident.* | wrong function: *Il* `nsubj`, *accident* `obj` (the treebank has *Il* `expl:subj`, *accident* `nsubj`) |
| *Le chat que la voisine nourrit dort.* | wrong: the relative clause with a noun subject is not found (*que* `case`, *nourrit* `amod`) |

Writing the elision with a space does not help (*qu' il* gives the three tokens *qu*, *'*, *il*), so the parser cannot be fed treebank-style tokens through the English tokenizer. The same traces are used in the *How Mova handles it* sections of the following chapters.

**What Mova does not do for French.** No French tokenizer (clitic splitting, *au/du/des*, hyphenated pronouns); no morphology or lemmatizer; no French subtypes in the relation set; no enhanced graph (the French treebanks have none: the `DEPS` column is empty in all of them); no handling of non-projective arcs (the parser is a projective shift-reduce parser, §10); no French pragmatics or frames (the frames reader in [`prag/src/frames.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/prag/) takes negation, tense and modality from English words). The first steps would be a French tokenizer lexicon built from the multiword tokens of the treebanks (11 022 in GSD, each a two-word split), the relation subtypes of §6 added to the enum, and a conversion of GSD to the shapes the frames reader expects.

## 13. Sources

- Universal Dependencies guidelines and the French treebank READMEs (UD 2.18): UD_French-GSD (changelog), ParisStories, Rhapsodie, Sequoia, PUD, FQB, ALTS, PoitevinDIVITAL, ParTUT, in ud-treebanks-v2.18; counts by the author with `awk`, 2026-11-06.
- de Marneffe et al., Universal Dependencies (2021): `demarneffe-2021`.
- Guillaume, de Marneffe & Perrier, *Conversion et améliorations de corpus du français annotés en Universal Dependencies* (2019): `guillaume-2019`.
- Gerdes, Guillaume, Kahane & Perrier, *SUD or Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies* (2018): `gerdes-2018`; and the 2019 update, `gerdes-2019`.
- Perrier, *Étude des dépendances syntaxiques non projectives en français* (TAL, 2021): `perrier-2021`.
- Kahane et al., *Annotation guidelines of UD and SUD treebanks for spoken corpora* (2021): `kahane-2021`; Botero-Garcia et al., *An intonosyntactic treebank for spoken French: what is new with Rhapsodie?* (2025): `garcia-2025`; Kahane et al., *Status of morphosyntactic features* (2025): `kahane-2025`.
- Olivier, Sevdali & Folli, *Clitic climbing and restructuring in the history of French* (Glossa, 2023): `olivier-2023`.
- Mova: [`en/src/main.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/en/) (`xpos_fill`, `xpos_of`, `tok_eval`, `parse_eval`, `explain`), [`en/src/gram.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/en/) (`Rel`), [`prag/src/frames.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/prag/); [Open parsers: witnesses and tests](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/repo-docs/parsers/); baselines in [What every language gets](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/PACKAGE/).
- The full list, with licences, is in [Sources](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/sources/).
- [← previous 19. The lexicon: layers, borrowings, multiword expressions and register](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/19-lexicon-mwe-register/)
- [next → 21. Clause structure](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/21-clause-structure/)
- [↑ back to Modern Standard French (fr) — a reference manual for Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/)