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In linguistics, a collective noun is a word referring to a collection of things taken as a whole. Most collective nouns in everyday speech are not specific to one kind of thing. [1] For example, the collective noun "group" can be applied to people ("a group of people"), or dogs ("a group of dogs"), or objects ("a group of stones").
Welsh has two systems of grammatical number, singular–plural and collective–singulative. Since the loss of the noun inflection system of earlier Celtic, plurals have become unpredictable and can be formed in several ways: by adding a suffix to the end of the word (most commonly -au), as in tad "father" and tadau "fathers", through vowel affection, as in bachgen "boy" and bechgyn "boys", or ...
Noun class 1 refers to mass nouns, collective nouns, and abstract nouns. examples: вода 'water', любовь 'love' Noun class 2 refers to items with which the eye can focus on and must be non-active examples: дом 'house', школа 'school' Noun class 3 refers to non-humans that are active. examples: рыба 'fish', чайка 'seagull'
What number is implicit in an unmarked noun depends on its class. In Kiowa, by default, Class I nouns are singular-dual, Class II nouns are plural (two or more), Class III nouns are dual, and Class IV nouns are mass nouns with no number. The inverse number marker changes the noun to whatever number(s) the unmarked noun isn't, such as changing ...
The word data is most often used as a singular collective mass noun in educated everyday usage. [1] [2] However, due to the history and etymology of the word, considerable controversy has existed on whether it should be considered a mass noun used with verbs conjugated in the singular, or should be treated as the plural of the now-rarely-used datum.
The best-known source of many English words used for collective groupings of animals is The Book of Saint Albans, an essay on hunting published in 1486 and attributed to Juliana Berners. [1] Most terms used here may be found in common dictionaries and general information web sites. [2] [3] [4
Generally, collective nouns such as group, family, and committee are not mass nouns but are rather a special subset of count nouns. However, the term "collective noun" is often used to mean "mass noun" (even in some dictionaries) because users conflate two different kinds of verb number invariability: (a) that seen with mass nouns such as ...
Additionally, there are polyplural noun classes. A polyplural noun class is a plural class for more than one singular class. [4] For example, Proto-Bantu class 10 contains plurals of class 9 nouns and class 11 nouns, while class 6 contains plurals of class 5 nouns and class 15 nouns. Classes 6 and 10 are inherited as polyplural classes by most ...