The Structure of Modern Standard French A Student Grammar

This book is an advanced student's grammar of French that integrates traditional grammar with knowledge and insights from modern linguistics. Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen takes a structural approach to French grammar: she provides clear descriptions of grammatical rules based explicitly on syntactic structure, and places descriptive emphasis on instances where the grammatical structures of French differ from those used in corresponding contexts in English. The first part of the book provides an introduction to French sentence structure, before the following parts examine the grammar of verbs, nominals, particles, and clauses and sentences. The Structure of Modern Standard French will be a valuable resource for students of French at undergraduate level and beyond. It assumes some prior knowledge of French grammar but is designed to be accessible to those with no background in linguistics.

Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen is Professor of French Language and Linguistics at the University of Manchester. She holds a PhD and Higher Doctorate in French Linguistics from the University of Copenhagen, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2013. She is the author of The Function of Discourse Particles: A Study with Special Reference to Spoken Standard French (Benjamins, 1996), and Particles at the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface: Synchronic and Diachronic Issues (Elsevier/Brill, 2008) and of numerous journal articles and book chapters in the areas of French grammar, linguistics, and pragmatics, from both a synchronic and diachronic point of view.