English to French please

[MIMI]

How do you translate "form class" (linguistic technical term) in French please???

[Pierre]

Do you mean as defined here : http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/CL/volk/SyntaxV ... axDef.html ?

Bloomfield defined form classes, rather imprecisely, in terms of some common "recognizable phonetic or grammatical feature" shared by all the members. He gave as examples the form class consisting of "personal substantive expressions" in English (defined as "the forms that, when spoken with exclamatory final pitch, are calls for a person's presence or attention"--e.g., "John," "Boy," "Mr. Smith"); the form class consisting of "infinitive expressions" (defined as "forms which, when spoken with exclamatory final pitch, have the meaning of a command"--e.g., "run," "jump," "come here"); the form class of "nominative substantive expressions" (e.g., "John," "the boys"); and so on. It should be clear from these examples that form classes are similar to, though not identical with, the traditional parts of speech and that one and the same form can belong to more than one form class.