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For example, in Spanish, nouns composed of a verb and its plural object usually have the verb first and noun object last (e.g. the legendary monster chupacabras, literally "sucks-goats", or in a more natural English formation "goatsucker") and the plural form of the object noun is retained in both the singular and plural forms of the compound ...
At least three criteria are used in defining syntactic categories: The type of meaning it expresses; The type of affixes it takes; The structure in which it occurs; For instance, many nouns in English denote concrete entities, they are pluralized with the suffix -s, and they occur as subjects and objects
Lexical categories (considered syntactic categories) largely correspond to the parts of speech of traditional grammar, and refer to nouns, adjectives, etc. A phonological manifestation of a category value (for example, a word ending that marks "number" on a noun) is sometimes called an exponent .
The generation of the English plural dogs from dog is an inflectional rule, and compound phrases and words like dog catcher or dishwasher are examples of word formation. Informally, word formation rules form "new" words (more accurately, new lexemes), and inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme).
Unlike some common nouns, proper nouns do not typically show number contrast in English. Most proper nouns in English are singular and lack a plural form, though some may instead be plural and lack a singular form. For example, we typically expect Michigan but not *Michigans and the Philippines [b] but not *Philippine. Proper nouns also differ ...
For instance, in Swahili the word rafiki 'friend' belongs to the class 9 and its "plural form" is marafiki of the class 6, even if most nouns of the 9 class have the plural of the class 10. For this reason, noun classes are often referred to by combining their singular and plural forms, e.g., rafiki would be classified as "9/6", indicating that ...
Latin has different singular and plural forms for nouns, verbs, and adjectives, in contrast to English where adjectives do not change for number. [10] Tundra Nenets can mark singular and plural on nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and postpositions. [11] However, the most common part of speech to show a number distinction is pronouns.
Proper nouns that are plural in form take a plural verb in both AmE and BrE; for example, The Beatles are a well-known band; The Diamondbacks are the champions, with one major exception: in American English, the United States is almost universally used with a singular verb.