J'ai encore des cadeaux à acheter

Jonathan G.B2Kwiziq 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://kwiziq.learnfrenchwithalexa.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 !

 

Chris W.C1 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.

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