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UD for French

In version 2.17, the French language is composed of nine treebanks but two of them don’t contain modern French:

UD_French-ALTS contains data from the 16th century which is quite different from modern French.
UD_French-PoitevinDIVITAL contains data in Poitevin-Saintongeais (Glottocode: poit1241)

The description below is relative to the seven modern French corpora.

Tokenization and Word Segmentation

In general, words are delimited by whitespace characters and punctuations are considered as separated words.
Only numbers can contain spaces (following the regexp [0-9 ,]+).
There are several closed classes of contractions that are treated as multi-word tokens and segmented to individual syntactic words. For instance, au -> à + le, auquel -> de + lequel. Note that du and des are ambiguous and can be split or not depending of their usage.

For more details, see tokenization.

Nominal words (NOUN, PROPN and PRON) have an inherent Gender feature with one of two values: Masc or Fem.
The two values of the Number feature are Sing and Plur. The following parts of speech inflect for number: NOUN, PROPN, PRON, ADJ, DET, VERB, AUX (finite and participles).
Case has 4 possible values: Nom, Dat, Acc, Com. It occurs only with personal pronouns (PRON). The “case” (i.e., role w.r.t. predicates or other phrases) of other nominals is expressed using prepositions, not morphologically.
Definite has 2 values: Ind, Def. It is used to distinguish the indefinite and definite articles (DET).

Polarity is used only with the Neg value to mark the negative adverbs ne, pas, plus, jamais.

Infinitives only have the VerbForm=Inf feature.
Finite verbs always have one of the four values of Mood: Ind, Imp, Sub and Cnd.
Finite verbs can have one of four values of Tense: Past, Imp, Pres, Fut.
Past participles have VerbForm=Part, Tense=Past, Gender (Masc or Fem), and Number (Sing or Plur).

PronType is used with pronouns (PRON) and determiners (DET).
NumType is used with numerals (NUM) and adjectives (ADJ).
The Poss=Yes feature marks possessive personal determiners (e.g. mon “my”),
The Reflex=Yes feature is always used on PRON together with PronType=Prs and it marks reflexive pronouns (me, te, se, nous, vous).
Person is a lexical feature of personal pronouns (PRON) and has three values, 1, 2 and 3. Person is not marked on other types of pronouns and on nouns, although they can be almost always interpreted as the 3rd person.
- As a cross-reference to subject, person is also marked on finite verbs (VERB, AUX).
layered features Number[psor] and Person[psor] are used on possessive personal determiners to indicate possessor related features.

Note that since version 2.17, the four treebanks built from SUD (GSD, Sequoia, ParisStories and Rhapsodie) use a more detailed feature system:

Number[cxtx] and Gender[cxtx] when the corresponding feature is not morphologically marked but can be inferred from the context.
Number[lex] and Gender[lex] when the corresponding feature is lexical and not morphological , such as the Gender of nouns
Tense[denom], which is used for denominative features (associated with VerbForm=Part). See the following paper for more details:

Sylvain Kahane, Bruno Guillaume, Léna Brun, and Simeng Song. 2025. Status of morphosyntactic features Illustration with written and spoken French UD treebanks. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT, SyntaxFest 2025), pages 154–159, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Association for Computational Linguistics.

See French features) for links.

This is an overview only. For more detailed discussion and examples, see the list of French relations.

The dominant word order in French is SVO, but other word orders are also possible.
Nominal subject (nsubj) is generally a bare noun phrase without preposition. If it is a personal pronoun, it must be in the nominative form. The morphology of a finite verb (or auxiliary) cross-references the person and number of its subject.
Direct nominal object (obj) is a bare noun phrase or a pronoun with accusative case. The accusative pronoun is a clitic and its position in the word order is fixed, the pronoun is before the verb (exept when Mood=Imp).
The relation iobj is used for indirect object when they are pronoun and they come with no preposition.
The relation obl for oblique argument is given with subtype arg or mod in most treebanks (see table below).

The following relation subtypes are used in French:

Corpus	FQB	GSD	ParisStories	ParTUT	PUD	Rhapsodie	Sequoia
acl:relcl	77	3240	310	301	227	507	520
advcl:cleft	17	212	40			78	20
aux:caus	3	250	16	13	9	27	34
aux:pass	247	3401	105	241	226	134	759
aux:tense	503	3837	1012		568	492	948
csubj:pass		26		1	2	1	4
dep:comp		15	27			40	5
expl:comp	176	211	298		28	293	44
expl:pass		687	23			33	57
expl:pv		1017	49		2		242
expl:subj	333	931	314		83	425	237
flat:foreign	131	1075		3	113	6	136
flat:name	581	7005	31	61	252	161	807
iobj:agent		24	1	1			1
nmod:appos			4			121
nsubj:caus	1	132	4	4	4	14	16
nsubj:outer		23	23			14	3
nsubj:pass	240	3666	41	224	200	123	620
obj:agent		111	3	9	4		12
obj:lvc		554	84			68	2
obl:agent	30	1554	2	69	1	3	281
obl:arg	570	8670	508		80	812	1608
obl:mod	611	15927	1057		81	1118	2392
parataxis:insert		183				15	126
parataxis:parenth			27			39

There are nine French UD treebanks:

Note that the UD_French-FTB was now retired because it was not updated to follow the latest validation contraints.