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In linguistics, grammatical number is a feature of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). [1] English and many other languages present number categories of singular or plural. Some languages also have a dual, trial and paucal number or other arrangements.
The key difference between adjectives and determiners in English is that adjectives cannot function as determinatives. The determinative function is an element in NPs that is obligatory in most singular countable NPs and typically occurs before any modifiers (see § Functions ).
Ordinal number – Generalization of "n-th" to infinite cases (the related, but more formal and abstract, usage in mathematics) Ordinal data, in statistics; Ordinal date – Date written as number of days since first day of year; Regnal ordinal – Ordinal numbers used to distinguish among persons with the same name who held the same office
Adjectives may be formed by the addition of affixes to a base from another category of words. For example, the noun recreation combines with the suffix -al to form the adjective recreational. Prefixes of this type include a-+ noun (blaze → ablaze) and non-+ noun (stop → non-stop).
Some theories consider "numeral" to be a synonym for "number" and assign all numbers (including ordinal numbers like "first") to a part of speech called "numerals". [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Numerals in the broad sense can also be analyzed as a noun ("three is a small number"), as a pronoun ("the two went to town"), or for a small number of words as an ...
Most English personal pronouns have five forms: the nominative case form, the oblique case form, a distinct reflexive or intensive form (such as myself, ourselves) which is based upon the possessive determiner form but is coreferential to a preceding instance of nominative or oblique, and the possessive case forms, which include both a ...
"Where morphemes of both number and case are present and both follow or both precede the noun base, the expression of number almost always comes between the noun base and the expression of case." "When the adjective follows the noun, the adjective expresses all the inflectional categories of the noun. In such cases the noun may lack overt ...
Noun classes form a system of grammatical agreement. A noun in a given class may require: agreement affixes on adjectives, pronouns, numerals, etc. in the same noun phrase, agreement affixes on the verb, a special form of pronoun to replace the noun, an affix on the noun, a class-specific word in the noun phrase.