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Collective nouns that have a singular form but take a plural verb form are called collective plurals. An example of such a metonymic shift in the plural-to-singular direction is the following sentence: "Mathematics is my favorite academic subject".
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 linguistics, agreement or concord (abbreviated agr) occurs when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates. [1] It is an instance of inflection, and usually involves making the value of some grammatical category (such as gender or person) "agree" between varied words or parts of the sentence.
Rather than select a single definition, Gledhill [3] proposes that collocation involves at least three different perspectives: co-occurrence, a statistical view, which sees collocation as the recurrent appearance in a text of a node and its collocates; [4] [5] [6] construction, which sees collocation either as a correlation between a lexeme and ...
In the first Swahili example, the noun has the prefix m-because it is part of class 1 for human beings. The prefix m-then agrees with the adjective m-dogo. The verb agreement is different simply because the verb agreement for class 1 is a-rather than m-. The second example has the prefix ki-because the noun basket is part of class 7. Class 7 ...
Grammatical number is typically marked on nouns in English, and present-tense verbs show agreement with the subject. But there are cases of mismatch, such as with a singular collective noun as the subject and plural agreement on the verb (e.g., The team are working hard).
For example, with collective nouns such as committee, which denote a unit composed of multiple individuals, agreement can either be singular because the noun is morphologically singular (e.g., The committee has not yet come to a decision) or plural because it is semantically plural (e.g.,The committee have not yet come to a decision). [26]
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.