French clitic pronouns in interlinear gloss (Je t’aime)

What this example shows

French Je t’aime means “I love you”, but the object pronoun sits before the verb, not after it. The object t’ is a clitic, a small word that leans on the verb. Aligned against English, the example shows the clitic getting its own box and the links crossing where the two languages disagree on order.

Three tokens, reordered

Each French token and its English match:

Je I

The subject pronoun, matching English “I”.

t’ you

The object pronoun, a clitic placed before the verb. In English “you” comes after the verb.

aime love

The verb “love”.

Why the connectors cross

French orders the words subject, object, verb, while English orders them subject, verb, object. So t’ links to “you” at the end of the English line and aime links to “love” in the middle, and those two links cross. The crossing is the visual sign that the object and verb swap places between the languages.

Glossing conventions used here

A clitic is set off as its own token, and in some glossing styles it is joined to its host with a double hyphen or an equals sign rather than a plain space. Keeping t’ separate lets it link to its own English word and makes the reordering visible.

For the gloss labels and marks:

• glossing abbreviations cheat sheet

Recreate it in the editor

Open the example and adjust the split rules under Settings → Tokens so the elided t’ stays as one token. Export the diagram as PNG, SVG, or PDF for a lesson on pronoun placement.

See also

Related examples:

• English and French word alignment is the plain one-to-one starting point.
• Japanese, Chinese, and English word order shows crossing links from object and verb order.