Auxiliary Verbs In French

The plurals problem

Examining the problems in the use of the singular and the plural in English.

I HAVE deliberately coined the above tongue-twisting title for the tricky topic of singular and plural in English.

Consider a recent excerpt ( Star/StarBiz , June 17, p.1), where I underline the points of contention and insert my proposed correction (italicized and put in brackets), as follows: “... each of this ( these ) new generation aircraft which uses ( use ) 15% less fuel is priced at US$80.8mil and MAS being a long-term customer may be get ( maybe gets OR may get ) discounts. ... MAS also plans to order 30 aircraft for its low-cost unit Firefly but details of when it will make that order is ( are ) unclear.”

The first sentence seemingly exhibits uncertainty about the grammatical number of the noun “aircraft”. The phrase “each of” indicates one individual out of many, in this case “aircraft”, which in this context is plural even though it has the singular form. In that plural context, then, the demonstrative adjective “this” should be amended to “these”. Furthermore, “aircraft” being in the plural would govern the plural verb “use” instead of the singular “uses”.

In the second sentence, the coordinate clause has “details” (plural) as the subject, which would therefore govern the plural verb “are” instead of the singular “is”, regardless of the distance separating subject and verb.

The above example encapsulates one inescapable feature in English (and in other languages such as Latin) – that nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verbs must accord with one another. It is the noun or other substantive (pronoun, gerund and to -infinitive) that determines the grammatical number in a sentence, and other parts of speech agree accordingly.

This article outlines some instances where the singular and the plural forms of nouns, substantives, etc. may confuse, and to note the special ways in which these are used.

The plural of nouns

In the main, nouns form the plural by adding the suffix -s ( boy/boys ) or -es ( mango/mangoes , bus/buse s). In addition, there are, in English, many unusual plural forms, e.g. knife/knives , mouse/mice , man/men , child/children , ox/oxen.

The so-called loan words, i.e.

French Lesson Week2 - Leçon 1 [French Auxiliary Verb AVOIR]

Hi, I’m Brazilian living in the US and I speak english, Portuguese and Spanish. Inane taken French classes in high school for 4 consecutive years. I don’t have anyone to practice with so it’s been 4 years that I haven’t studied it. My pronunciation is great and so is my writhing and reading. The only problem I have is that I can’t have a conversation. I can’t put sentences together. Probably because I never had anyone to practice with. Is there anything you can do to help me? To remember everyt

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@nido76 Bonjour Nido. “ils ont” is not pronounced the same as “ils sont”. The first one is pronounced ILZON (hard z)while the 2nd one is pronounced ILSSON (soft s)

If you apply the same rule to “elles ont” vs “elles sont” you should be able to pronounce them correctly too. Hope? this helps. (and if you’re having too much difficulty, check the verbs on my site.

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