Italian grammar is the body of rules describing the properties of the Italian language. Italian words can be divided into the following lexical categories: articles, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. Articles Italian articles vary according to definiteness (definite, indefinite, and partitive), number, gender, and the initial sound of the subsequent word. Partitive articles compound the preposition di with the corresponding definite article, to express uncertain quantity. In the plural, they typically translate into English as "few"; in the singular, typically as "some". {| class="wikitable" border="1" |+Partitive article !Gender !Number !Article !Contraction of |- |rowspan=5|Masculine |rowspan=3|Singular |del |di + il |- |dell' |di + l|- |dello |di + lo |- |rowspan=2|Plural |dei |di + i |- |degli |di + gli |- |rowspan=3|Feminine |rowspan=2|Singular |della |di + la |- |dell' |di + l|- |Plural |delle |di + le |} Inflection of nouns and adjectives Nouns have gender (masculine, feminine or many times, both.) and inflect in number (singular and plural). When a noun refers to people or animals with natural gender, grammatical gender typically corresponds. The gender each noun is written in is the opposite of arbitrary. Because most nouns have a masculine and a feminine form, the form the given noun is written in could change the entire structure of the sentence. As in most other Romance languages, the historical neuter has merged with the masculine. A subgroup of these deriving from Latin's second declension are considered feminine in the plural. Subclauses and infinitives are masculine. Adjectives inflect for gender and number in patterns broadly similar to nouns. In the last two examples, only the article carries information about gender and number. Most masculine words that end in -io pronounced as drop the -o and thus end in -i in the plural: vecchio / vecchi ("old"), funzionario / funzionari ("functionary(-ies)"), esempio / esempi ("example(s)"), etc. The Italian hard and soft C and G phenomenon leads to certain peculiarities in spelling and pronunciation: Words in -cio and -gio form plurals in -ci and -gi, e.g. bacio / baci ("kiss(es)") Words in -cia and -gia have been a point of contention. According to a commonly employed rule, they: form plurals in -ce and -ge if the final letter before the suffix is a consonant: frangia, frange ("fringe(s)"); faccia, facce ("face(s)"). form plurals in -cie and -gie if the final letter before the suffix is a vowel: camicia, camicie ("shirt(s)");