In linguistics, paucal is a number that specifies 'a few' things. This is in contrast to singular (1 thing), dual (2 things), trial (3 things), plural (many things), collective (a set of things), singulative plural (one thing composed from many pieces). Linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and someone who engages in this study is called a linguist or linguistician. ... Number, in linguistics, is a grammatical category used to express the quantity of objects referred to by a noun. ...
It should also be noted that the distinction between the paucal and the plural and the greater plural is often relative to the type of object under discussion.
For example, for oranges the paucalnumber might imply less than ten, whereas for the population of a country it might be used for a few hundred thousand.
In Serbo-Croatian (in addition to the paucal for numbers 2-4), several nouns have alternate forms for counting plural and collective plural (the latter being treated as a collective noun).
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