Word
C'est cette équipe qui mérite la victoire.
Meaning
It is this team that deserves the victory.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of C'est cette équipe qui mérite la victoire.
qui
who
ce
this (before a noun)
l'équipe
the team (f)
c'est
it is, that is
Questions & Answers about C'est cette équipe qui mérite la victoire.
Why do we use qui here instead of que?
In French emphasis structures, you use qui when the emphasized part is the subject of the action that follows. Here, cette équipe (this team) is doing the action of deserving. If the emphasized part were the object of the action, you would use que instead, such as in C'est cette équipe que je soutiens (It is this team that I support).
Can I just say Cette équipe mérite la victoire?
Why is the verb mérite conjugated in the singular when a team has many players?
The pronoun qui acts as the subject for the verb mérite, and it takes on the gender and number of the noun it refers back to. Since cette équipe is a grammatically singular noun (equivalent to 'it' or 'she'), the verb takes the third-person singular form. Even though a team contains many people, the grammatical noun itself is singular.
Why is it cette équipe and not cet équipe since it starts with a vowel?