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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.
French has a T-V distinction in the second person singular. That is, it uses two different sets of pronouns: tu and vous and their various forms. The usage of tu and vous depends on the kind of relationship (formal or informal) that exists between the speaker and the person with whom they are speaking and the age differences between these subjects. [1]
Nowadays, the form of lequel is typically replaced with qui when the antecedent is a person: « la femme de qui j'ai parlé ». Further, if the preposition is de , even if it is not the de of the possession, dont has started to be used (with both person and non-person antecedents): « la femme dont j'ai parlé ».
Second-language learners are often encouraged to memorize a modifier, usually a definite article, in conjunction with each noun—for example, a learner of French may learn the word for "chair" as la chaise (meaning "the chair"); this carries the information that the noun is chaise, and that it is feminine (because la is the feminine singular ...
In the object form the pronouns are: me, te, le, la, it, nos, vos, and les (with los and las as specific masculine and feminine forms, respectively). In the oblique case , the pronouns are me , te , il (or le ), noi (or nos ), voi (or vos ), and ili (or les ), varying by user and situation for pronouns except me and te . [ 8 ]
French has an example of morphologically conditioned alternation. The feminine form of many adjectives ends in a consonant sound that is missing in the masculine form. In spelling, the feminine ends in a silent e, while the masculine ends in a silent consonant letter: [2] masculine petit [pəti], feminine petite [pətit] ' small '
In spoken French, the plurality of most nouns is marked not on the form of the noun itself but by a preceding article or determiner (cf. la maison [la mɛzɔ̃] 'the house' > les maisons [le mɛzɔ̃] 'the houses'; mon frère [mɔ̃ fʁɛːʁ] 'my brother' > mes frères [me fʁɛːʁ] 'my brothers').
D'la (de la) is an example where the word de has nearly fallen out of usage over time and has become contracted. This argument does apply to other words, and this phenomenon has become widespread throughout contemporary French language. A defining characteristic of the sociolect is the deliberate use of the pronoun tu to indicate a question.