[help] sentences that are long and involve more than one idea?

When you have one long sentence i.e
[ the treatment of x and y] and then you add the word 'demontre' as in demonstrates, how exactly do you conjugate it? Do you conjugate it according to x and y and therefore treat it like "ils"?

And if one were to extend the sentence further, as in add a second sentence after demontre,
i.e.
[demonstrates x held by...] what conjugation would the verb placed after the object x be?
it sounds a little vague, and i apologize, but the stem of my question is how one would deal with long sentences that convey perhaps more than one subject with multiple verbs working at once...

I would have added a sentence but I'm completely unsure how to construct such a sentence..

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on October 18, 2011 at 4:24pm

In general, if your subject consists of two noun phrases joined with "et", then the verb will be in the plural. In English, it sometimes sounds OK to use a singular verb in such cases, but in French it would be much more common for the verb to be in the plural.

What you can do in French is join the two ideas with "ainsi que" instead of "et". And in that case, you will find more variation as to whether a singular or plural verb is used.