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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 ...
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.
But in generative grammar, which sees meaning as separate from grammar, they are categories that define the distribution of syntactic elements. [1] For structuralists such as Roman Jakobson grammatical categories were lexemes that were based on binary oppositions of "a single feature of meaning that is equally present in all contexts of use".
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.
The dummy subject takes the number (singular or plural) of the logical subject (complement), hence it takes a plural verb if the complement is plural. In informal English, however, the contraction there's is often used for both singular and plural.
The following trees are those of a dependency grammar: [11] Subjects 2. The subject is a dependent of the root node, the finite verb, in both trees. The object, in contrast, appears lower in the second tree, where it is a dependent of the non-finite verb. The subject remains a dependent finite verb when subject-auxiliary inversion occurs ...
Active–stative (or simply active): The argument (subject) of an intransitive verb can be in one of two cases; if the argument is an agent, as in "He ate", then it is in the same case as the agent (subject) of a transitive verb (sometimes called the agentive case), and if it is a patient, as in "He tripped", then it is in the same case as the ...
In sentences (4) and (5), it is in the subject position, while the real subject has been moved to the end of the sentence. A simple test can be done to see if the sentence contains an impersonal verb. One checks to see if a given subject pronoun takes an antecedent in the previous clause or sentence, e.g. Bukit Timah is 163.63 metres tall. It ...