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The prepositions à (' to, at ') and de (' of, from ') form contracted forms with the masculine and plural articles le and les: au, du, aux, and des, respectively. Like the, the French definite article is used with a noun referring to a specific item when both the speaker and the audience know what the item is. It is necessary in the following ...
French has three articles: definite, indefinite, and partitive. The difference between the definite and indefinite articles is similar to that in English (definite: the; indefinite: a, an), except that the indefinite article has a plural form (similar to some, though English normally does not use an article before indefinite plural nouns). The ...
The genitive singular definite article for masculine and neuter nouns is des, while the feminine and plural definite article is der. The indefinite articles are eines for masculine and neuter nouns, and einer for feminine and plural nouns (although the bare form cannot be used in the plural, it manifests in keiner, meiner, etc.)
The basic form is lequel (le + quel; see French articles and determiners for information about each component). Both parts of lequel are inflected to agree with its referent in gender and number: hence, laquelle, lesquels, lesquelles. The prepositions à and de contract with le and les to form au, aux, du, and des, respectively; this is still ...
French verbs have a large number of simple (one-word) forms. These are composed of two distinct parts: the stem (or root, or radix), which indicates which verb it is, and the ending (inflection), which indicates the verb's tense (imperfect, present, future etc.) and mood and its subject's person (I, you, he/she etc.) and number, though many endings can correspond to multiple tense-mood-subject ...
In English, the most common formation of plural nouns is by adding an -s suffix to the singular noun. (For details and different cases, see English plurals.) Just like in English, noun plurals in French, Spanish, and Portuguese are also typically formed by adding an -s suffix to the lemma form, sometimes combining it with an additional vowel ...
Compound nouns joined with hyphens (or fused) make their plural using normal rules, that is adding a final s or x, unless the modifier is an adjective (in which case both elements must agree), or the head is a determined noun, or a proper noun: des pèse-lettre → des pèse-lettres (letter scales) Loanwords also have a regular plural:
The determiner-noun agreement, shown in the tree in the middle, is a case of dependent-marking because the plural noun houses requires the dependent determiner to appear in its plural form, these, not in its singular form, this.