I’ve done a lot of searching but I cannot find rule explaining the following French grammar rule regarding “de”. Why is there no definite article after “de” in the following? One reason could be the quantity in the second example but why nor “de la famille” in the first example? One French person told me that because it’s “une mère” rather than “La mère” there is no article following “de”. Is it possible to say “Une mère de bébé” rather than "La mère du bébé? I don’t know. I don understand that there are fixed phrases that only take de followed by the noun. But the first example baffles me. I look forward to your feedback.
davidmich
Une mère de famille originaire de la région PACA a trouvé les vrais billets cachés dans une boîte de Monopoly à l’occasion de l’anniversaire du célèbre jeu.
A 65 ans, une mère de 13 enfants accouche de quadruplés
Mmm… I’m not up to par on linguistics, but I’ll give it a try.
“Une mère de famille” just means “A mother”, it is more or less a fixed phrase. “La mère de famille” would be “The mother”.
“Une mère de la famille” would make no sense in the context; such a phrase could only be used to specify a particular mother, as in: “Une mère de la famille Dupont”, provided that the context is a large family in which lots of people share the same last name, and it would translate as something like “A mother from the Dupont family”. I’ve just made it up, I’ve never encountered such a sentence. It’s awkward, as you can see, in French as well as in English.
“La mère du bébé” is " The baby’s mother", it’s the possessive case. “Une mère de bébé” makes no sense at all : “A mother of baby” ???
“Une mère de 13 enfants” means “A mother of thirteen (children)”, “de” in this case translates as “of”.
“Un accident de voiture” is “A car accident”. I think that “de” in this usage is called “article partitif” when used with a qualifier. It functions the same way with a complement: “Je bois de l’eau” = “I drink water”, “Je mange des légumes” = “I eat vegetables”, etc.
English is more economical. In French, you have to deal with “de”, “du”, “de la”, “des” every time you use a qualifier or a complement. Good luck!
Basically because “le” and “la” are definite articles. You use them when refering to something specific : the blue car, the Dupont family. As a result, you use “du” (standing for “de le”) and “de la” only when a definite article is required.
As already noted, French requires a “de” where English goes without any such preposition (basically we add “of” everywhere). So, generally speaking :
-when in English you don’t need any article, in French you use “de” : a car accident===> un accident de voiture.
-when in English you’d use an indefinite article, in French, you use “d’un” or “d’une” : I dreamt of a car ===> J’ai rêvé d’une voiture.
-when in english you’d use a definite article, in French you use “du” or “de la” : I dreamt of the blue car ===> J’ai rêvé de la voiture bleue.
(*)And “mere de famille” often, though not always, stands for “housewife”
Nitpick : It’s more general than that. “Bon père de famille” would rather be “reasonable head of household” or better “a reasonable caretaker”. It applies in many areas unrelated to children, like money or items. For instance, a single, childless, woman renting a house must occupy it “en bon père de famille” : she must not trash the place, for example.
In the example given by davidmich, I think it refers to her function as a mother (getting games for her children), although it doesn’t necessarily implies that she’s a stay-at-home mother.
So in the examples I gave can I say that “mère de famille” and “accident de voiture” are compound nouns and therefore do not require the definite article?
Une mère de famille originaire de la région PACA a trouvé les vrais billets cachés dans une boîte de Monopoly à l’occasion de l’anniversaire du célèbre jeu.
They do require an article; it has to be “la mère de famille” or “une mère de famille”, depending on the context. Just like “a box of tissues” or “the professor of economics” require articles in English.
I don’t know much French or Spanish, but lemme give this a try. I think the relevant rule applies in Spanish, and remarks like the above seem to suggest that this holds in French too.
Note the English phrase “a car accident”. What are the parts of speech here? The noun in this noun phrase is “accident”. The word “car” is a noun too, but in this usage, it serves as an adjective modifying the noun “accident”. (What kind of accident? A car accident.)
This is very common in English. I it’s called an adjunct noun : A noun used as an adjective to modify another noun.
In Spanish (and I gather in French too), this is not permitted. The modifying noun must instead be stuck into a prepositional phrase with the preposition “de”.
Thus, English “chicken burrito” in Spanish must be “burrito de pollo”. (Except in Spanglish, where bastardized phrases like “pollo burrito” are taking hold.)
Long story: I worked with an application program once that had a long long long configuration settings screen of 15-or-so screen pages. At the end of the last screen was the phrase: “End of [app-name] configuration data entry form”. Note ALL those adjunct nouns there!
In the Spanish version of our product, that became “Fin de forma de entrada de datos de configuración de [app-name]”, literally “End of form of entry of data of configuration of [app-name]”. (And, BTW, I’m not entirely sure if even that if exactly correct Spanish. We had a native Brazilian-Portuguese speaker, who also spoke fairly fluent Spanish, do the translations.)
Note also, that the English usage is more compact and economical with shorter phrases – BUT, it has the disadvantage of raising ambiguities.
Consider a sign on a lawn saying “Big Garage Sale!” – Is that a big sale of garages? Or a sale of big garages? (Actually, it isn’t either of those, usually. It’s a big sale in a garage.)
What is a Monster Chicken Burrito? A burrito containing meat from a Monster Chicken? Or a Monster Burrito containing chicken?
Spanish, although more verbose and awkward with those kinds of phrases, doesn’t give rise to ambiguities like this. Is this true in French too?
Nope, because the English expression has connotations that la mère du bébé does not. The French expression refers to the mother of a baby, with no additional socioeconomical implications.
But the article you’re referring to is the one before the compound noun; davidmich was specifically asking about articles after the de.
I would have used del formulario or, if allowed, come up with a different expression (if I’d been writing in Spanish it would just have been fin del formulario or even fin), but the translation is correct except for a missing article. That usage of forma is not in the dictionary but I’ve encountered it before.
In this particular case, the one de which is followed by an article in Spanish is the same one which would be followed by an article in the extended English version, the first one.
Perhaps someone can explain the rule governing this example of article omission:
“Je ne mets pas lait dans café” Is it a mistake? Is this a set phrase?
Technically, a “Big-Garage Sale” would distinguish the sale of large farm buildings from a “Big Garage Sale,” which is a large garage sale. This rule about hyphens has become old-fashioned, but I cling to it for its role in reducing ambiguity.
Agreed that the “de” in the OP’s question allows one noun to modify another: the “de + noun” is a prepositional phrase that functions as an adjective.
You know, I think sintagma preposicional complemento del nombre (the Spanish name for that kind of structure) is actually one character shorter than “prepositional phrase that functions as an adjective”
Of course, English also has “adjective phrase” to describe it. Though I see some actually use it to mean any group of words functioning as an adjective. I know I learned it as a type of prepositional phrase.
I don’t know if “compound noun” is the exact term, so I can’t help you there.
My understanding of the usage is that it marks the adjunct noun as representing an abstraction, or a category, as opposed to a specific object.
For instance “un accident d’avion” means “a plane crash” in general, whereas “l’accident de l’avion” would refer to a specific instance of an individual plane crashing. Note that the definite article occurs both with “accident” and with “avion” in this example. But it gets complicated with such phrases as “accident de la route”, where “la route” means “road traffic” in general and not a particular road. In this case, the definite article cannot be omitted before the adjunct noun.
It gets worse: if you want to say that you are a meat-eater, you would say “je mange de la viande”, but if you put the same sentence in the negative, it becomes “je ne mange pas de viande”, without the definite article.
Je bois un café = I drink / am drinking a cup of coffee
Je bois le café = I drink / am drinking the cup of coffee (that has been mentioned before)
Je bois du café = I am a coffee drinker (du being de+le, definite article)