J'ai encore des cadeaux à acheter

JonathanB2Kwiziq community member

J'ai encore des cadeaux à acheter

Shouldn't this be:

Marie "EN" a déjà tous achetés.  

Since the article here is "des" and not "les"... We just know there are "some" presents to buy, not any specific ones.

Asked 6 years ago
AurélieKwiziq team memberCorrect answer

Bonjour Jonathan !

You can only use "en" when you're replacing a group introduced by de, du, de la or des.

See also https://french.kwiziq.com/revision/grammar/the-adverbial-pronoun-en-can-replace-a-phrase-introduced-by-de

In this sentence - Marie les a déjà tous achetés. - the presence of "tous" means that the original sentence would be :
Marie a déjà acheté tous les cadeaux.
So no "des" here, therefore "en" is not an option in this sentence, only the direct object pronoun les is correct here.  

 

I hope that's helpful!
Bonne journée !

 

ChrisC1 Kwiziq Q&A super contributor

I Jonathan,

Grammatically, both possibilities are correct, although they have different connotations:

Marie en a déjà tous achetés. Versus: Marie les a déjà tous achetés.

The first one (with "en") implies that there is a certain fixed set of presents of which Marie bought all. The second one makes no such implication. I guess you would account for that in English like this, somehow:

Marie en a déjà achetés. -- Marie already bought all of them.
Marie les a déjà achetés. -- Marie bought them all.

I hope that helps, -- Chris (not a native speaker).

J'ai encore des cadeaux à acheter

Shouldn't this be:

Marie "EN" a déjà tous achetés.  

Since the article here is "des" and not "les"... We just know there are "some" presents to buy, not any specific ones.

Sign in to submit your answer

Don't have an account yet? Join today

Ask a question

Find your French level for FREE

Test your French to the CEFR standard

Find your French level
Clever stuff happening!