Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Examples of plural forms are the French mangeons, mangez, mangent – respectively the first-, second- and third-person plural of the present tense of the verb manger. In English a distinction is made in the third person between forms such as eats (singular) and eat (plural).
Fractions are themselves singular or plural depending on the numerator (e.g. one eighth vs two eighths), and whatever they apply to can be singular or plural (e.g., three-quarters of the apple(s)), depending on whether it refers to a fraction of a single item or many items.
English verbs distinguish singular from plural number in the third person present tense ("He goes" versus "They go"). Old English also contained dual grammatical numbers; Modern English retains a few residual terms reflective of dual number (such as both and neither , as opposed to all and none respectively), but they are generally considered ...
In British English (BrE), collective nouns can take either singular (formal agreement) or plural (notional agreement) verb forms, according to whether the emphasis is on the body as a whole or on the individual members respectively; compare a committee was appointed with the committee were unable to agree.
In fact the two categories are often conflated within verb conjugation patterns: there are specific verb forms for first person singular, second person plural and so on. Some examples: I really am (1st pers. singular) vs. We really are (1st pers. plural) The boy sings (3rd pers. singular) vs. The boys sing (3rd pers. plural)
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 ...
they are (third-person plural, and third-person singular) Other verbs in English take the suffix -s to mark the present tense third person singular, excluding singular 'they'. In many languages, such as French, the verb in any given tense takes a different suffix for any of the various combinations of person and number of the subject.
The verb be has two past tense forms: was (first and third person singular) and were (plural and second person). The past tense (preterite) form is used in what is called the simple past, in sentences such as We lit the fire and He liked to dance. One of the uses of this tense is to refer not to a past situation, but to a hypothetical (present ...