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These words are usually marked in dictionaries with the phrase "plural in form but singular in construction" (or similar wording). Others, such as aesthetics, are less strongly or consistently felt as singular; for the latter type, the dictionary phrase "plural in form but singular or plural in construction" recognizes variable usage.
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.
In many languages, words other than nouns may take plural forms, these being used by way of grammatical agreement with plural nouns (or noun phrases). Such a word may in fact have a number of plural forms, to allow for simultaneous agreement within other categories such as case, person and gender, as well as marking of categories belonging to ...
English nouns are not marked for case as they are in some languages, but they have possessive forms, through the addition of -'s (as in John's, children's) or just an apostrophe (with no change in pronunciation) in the case of -[e]s plurals (the dogs' owners) and sometimes other words ending with -s (Jesus' love).
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 .
With exceptions such as usage in The New York Times, the names of sports teams are usually treated as plurals even if the form of the name is singular. [5] The difference occurs for all nouns of multitude, both general terms such as team and company and proper nouns (for example where a place name is used to refer to a sports team). For instance,
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language classifies words like boy as nouns. [54] John Robert Ross similarly classifies it as an "adjectival noun", a noun with some adjectival properties. [53] Color terms also exhibit features of both nouns and adjectives. In many cases, the category of these terms can be clearly identified.
The word "glasses" (a set of corrective lenses to improve eyesight) is plurale tantum. In contrast, the word "glass"—either a container for drinks (a count noun) or a vitreous substance (a mass noun)—may be singular or plural. Some words, such as "brain" and "intestine", can be used as either plurale tantum nouns or count nouns.