Hi
I’ve looked at all the moods and related tenses in French, but I cannot find out under which moods the “futur proche” and “futur compose” fall. My feeling is “futur proche” falls under the Indicative Mood, but I’m not sure. I look forward to your help.
davidmich
futur composé is the same as futur proche
I don’t really know why you are asking about fine points of French grammar on an English speaking board (and I never got that far with French), but, if those are tenses, surely they can be in whatever mood is appropriate. Tense and mood are orthogonal aspects of verb inflection.
The future is sort of inherently subjunctive, in that it hasn’t actually happened and therefore isn’t describing real time. Paradoxically, this means that there is no need for the distinction in mood in the future tense, and in French (and Latin) the future is considered indicative.
Or what njtt said.
Wordreference.com is a great site for questions of this nature.
Here’s the French grammar forum (requires quick, easy, free registration if you want to ask a new question, but I think not even that if you want to search existing questions, answers, and discussions – of which there are currently 15,000.)
This sentence has a nice rhythm.
/This post is rather unimportant.
Coincidentally, just last night I learned what “orthogonal” means (in the semantic/logical sense). Philosopher John Symonds used it in a talk – he said that the human-defined “importance” of some software task is orthogonal to the mathematically-defined “difficulty” of that task.
/This post is even less important.
Thanks Dr. Drake. “Future proche” doesn’t appear in any of my French grammar books, nor have I found it among the many lists posted online. I did finally come across it in the context of Indicatif. Thanks all.
davidmich
The futur proche never appears in the subjunctive form, as Dr. Drake said.
If you want to apply the subjunctive mood to a future event, you use the subjunctive form of the present tense.
Indicative: Vous allez finir le livre demain.
Subjunctive: Il faut que vous finissiez le livre demain.