Speed Up Your French: Strategies to avoid common errors (2016)

State as opposed to action

1 Pronominal verbs like s’asseoir (to sit down) sometimes cause problems when there is a need to distinguish between a state and an action.

The crucial thing to note is that if you want to express a state, such as ‘she was sitting / seated’, you must not use a pronominal form. What you need here is the imperfect tense of être and the past participle assis. If you made the mistake of using the pronominal verb elle s’asseyait, you would be expressing an action in the imperfect tense, ‘she was in the process of sitting down’ or ‘she used to sit down’ in certain circumstances. If you used the pronominal verb form elle s’était assise, you would still be expressing an action, but in the pluperfect tense, ‘she had sat down’. In this case, the object pronoun s’ before the verb makes all the difference between an action and a state. With it you have an action, without it a state.

Mnemonic device

Perhaps the main problem for native English speakers comes from the use of a present participle in English: ‘he was sitting’. If you paraphrase this into a past participle of state, ‘he was seated’, the correct rendering in French becomes more obvious.

2 There are many verbs that work like this in French. They include the following.

Elle était accroupie dans le coin.

(She was crouching in the corner.)

Elle était accoudée à la table.

(She was leaning with her elbows on the table.)

Elle était agenouillée devant l’autel.

(She was kneeling at the altar.)

Elle était allongée sur le lit.

(She was lying down on the bed.)

Elle était blottie contre sa mère.

(She was snuggling up against her mother.)

Elle était pendue à son bras.

(She was clinging onto his arm.)