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Use of 'de' versus 'des'
I am confused about the usage of the prepositions 'de' versus 'des'. What we have learned in basic French is that des is a contraction of de + les and is thus used to refer to plural nouns. However, in readings I have noticed many cases where de is used before plural nouns. I give several examples below:
Marc parle de sports.
Il n’a pas de soeurs.
Julie apprends de nouveaux mots français.
Julie et lui restent de bons amis.
Ils ont de très bonnes glaces.
Ils ont fait de grandes contributions.
Can anyone explain to me why the preposition 'de' is used in these expressions rather than 'des'?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on
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You actually have three different cases here. For simplicity, I'll respond to each case in a separate reply.
So, the first case. In the first sentence, recall that de can be a "normal" preposition meaning "of, about" (as well as "from"). And it can also have its "special" function where, combining with le, la, les, it essentially means "some". In your first sentence, imagine firstly if you wanted to say "Marc is talking about three sports". This would be, as you might expect:
Marc parle de [trois sports].
Notice how you have de here, with its "non special" use as a preposition meaning "about". Now, on the basis of this sentence, imagine that we want to say "Marc is talking about some/various sports", given that "des" means some. Logically speaking, we would expect the following:
Marc parle de [des sports].
In other words, logically speaking, we would expect de twice: once as a preposition, and then again as part of the word des meaning "some".
But although this is completely logical, it turns out that it's not what French speakers actually say. It turns out that whenever you would logically get two de's one after the other like this, in practice only the first de is retained. So that is how you end up with:
Marc parle de [ sports].
Other common examples of this phenomenon include:
J'ai besoin de [du lait] --> J'ai besoin de lait.
Une bouteille de [de l'eau] --> Une bouteille d'eau.
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In your second sentence, the reason for only using de and not des is essentially because of the negative. When the sentence is negated, usually de on its own is used (instead of un(e), du, de la or des). If you like, it's the rough equivalent of "any" in English. So just as it usually sounds odd in English to say "I haven't got some sisters", it usually sounds odd in French to say Je n'ai pas des soeurs.
(However, unlike English any, you would still use des etc in a question in French.)
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The remainder of your examples stem from an artificial rule that is sometimes followed in formal or literary French.
In formal usage, writers have traditionally preferred to change "des" to "de" before an adjective that comes before a noun.
In everyday speech and in less formal writing, speakers would frequently say and write "des bons amis", "des nouveaux mots" etc as you would expect.
Even the traditional rule actually allowed for "des" to be used in many cases where the adjective and noun "strongly formed a set expression". So it's even fair to say that in many cases using "de" rather than "des" in these cases is a bit of a hypercorrection.
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