Language/French/Grammar/Grammatical-and-real-number

Grammatical and real number

With grammatically singular nouns that refer to more than one person or thing, the choice of pronoun is normally singular il or elle:

• Quant au gouvernement, il ne prendra jamais les mesures qui s'imposent

As for the government, they will never take the necessary steps

• Le comité va-t-il élire un nouveau président?

Will the committee elect a new chairperson?

• En ce qui concerne l'équipe française, on peut dire qu'elle est en grande forme en ce moment

As for the French team, they are currently on top form

Once you've mastered this lesson, take a look at these related pages: Possessive determiners, Omission of the article, Adverbs ending in —ment derived from the masculine form of an adjective & How to use Have.

Other Lessons

• Adjectives agreeing with just one noun
• Subject verb agreement — Verb agreement with collective noun subjects
• Verb agreement with fractions
• How to Guess the Gender of French Nouns
• Differences in the use of numbers in French and English Order of cardinal numbers and adjectives
• French Ditransitive verbs
• Demonstrative pronouns
• Agreement of the past participle with the subject of “être”
• Déterminants
• Easy way of generating the present tense
• Grammatical and real gender
• How to use “et” in cardinal numbers
• Talk about Prices
• Use of y in constructions where à does not introduce an indirect object
• Use of ce, cela, ça as neutral pronouns