Ad
related to: what does a plural mean in english form of nouns quiz questions
Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
In English, the most common formation of plural nouns is by adding an -s suffix to the singular noun. (For details and different cases, see English plurals .) Just like in English, noun plurals in French, Spanish, and Portuguese are also typically formed by adding an -s suffix to the lemma form, sometimes combining it with an additional vowel.
In American English (AmE), collective nouns are almost always singular in construction: the committee was unable to agree. However, when a speaker wishes to emphasize that the individuals are acting separately, a plural pronoun may be employed with a singular or plural verb: the team takes their seats, rather than the team takes its seats.
In languages with a singular/dual/plural paradigm, the exact meaning of plural depends on whether the dual is obligatory or facultative (optional). [16] In contrast to English and other singular/plural languages where plural means two or more, in languages with an obligatory dual, plural strictly means three or more.
In English, the plural form of words ending in -us, especially those derived from Latin, often replaces -us with -i. There are many exceptions, some because the word does not derive from Latin, and others due to custom (e.g., campus, plural campuses).
Most English personal pronouns have five forms: the nominative and oblique case forms, the possessive case, which has both a determiner form (such as my, our) and a distinct independent form (such as mine, ours) (with two exceptions: the third person singular masculine and the third person singular neuter it, which use the same form for both ...
Irregularly, English nouns are marked as plural in other ways, often inheriting the plural morphology of older forms of English or the languages that they are borrowed from. Plural forms from Old English resulted from vowel mutation (e.g., foot/feet ), adding – en (e.g., ox/oxen ), or making no change at all (e.g., this sheep/those sheep ).
Dual (abbreviated DU) is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and plural.When a noun or pronoun appears in dual form, it is interpreted as referring to precisely two of the entities (objects or persons) identified by the noun or pronoun acting as a single unit or in unison.