Breakdown of Ils m'exaspèrent, tous les gens qui klaxonnent !
ils
they (masculine/mixed)
les gens
the people
qui
who
tout
all, everything
me
me, myself (object pronoun)
exaspérer
to exasperate
klaxonner
to honk
Questions & Answers about Ils m'exaspèrent, tous les gens qui klaxonnent !
Why does the sentence start with Ils if the actual subject is tous les gens?
This is a structure called right dislocation. In everyday spoken French, it is very common to state your main thought first (Ils m'exaspèrent) and then attach the specific subject at the end for clarification (tous les gens qui klaxonnent). The pronoun Ils acts as a grammatical placeholder for the noun phrase that gets pushed to the back.
Could I just write this normally as Tous les gens qui klaxonnent m'exaspèrent?
Yes, absolutely. That is the standard, grammatically strict word order. However, using right dislocation emphasizes your feeling of exasperation upfront, making it sound much more natural and expressive in conversational French.
Why is the starting pronoun Ils instead of a neutral pronoun like Ça?
Because the pronoun is directly substituting a specific noun phrase (tous les gens), it must agree with it in gender and number. Since gens is a masculine plural noun, the placeholder pronoun must be the masculine plural Ils. You would use Ça for a whole concept or action, such as Ça m'exaspère quand les gens klaxonnent (It exasperates me when people honk).
Just to refresh, why is it qui klaxonnent and not que klaxonnent?
You must use qui because it acts as the subject of the verb klaxonnent (the people are the ones doing the honking). You use que when the relative pronoun is the object of the verb. A helpful trick: if a conjugated verb directly follows the pronoun, you almost always need qui.
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