Look up plural in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Plural is a grammatical number, typically referring to more than one of the referent in the real world. Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ...
Wiktionary is a multilingual, Web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in over 150 languages. ...
In linguistics, the term grammatical number refers to ways of expressing quantity by inflecting words. ...
In the English language, singular and plural are the only grammatical numbers. The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...
The word singular may refer to one of several concepts. ...
In English, nouns, pronouns, and demonstratives inflect for plurality. (See English plural.) In many other languages, for example German and the various Romance languages, articles and adjectives also inflect for plurality. For example, in the English sentence "The brown cats run," only the noun and verb are inflected; but in the French sentence Les chats bruns courent, every word (article, noun, adjective, and verb) is inflected. A noun, or noun substantive, is a part of speech which can co-occur with (in)definite articles and attributive adjectives, and function as the head of a noun phrase. ...
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun phrase. ...
== WHAT ABOUT THE MATH ONE??? HUH? == // Demonstratives are deictic words (they depend on an external frame of reference) that indicate which entities a speaker refers to, and distinguishes those entities from others. ...
In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification or marking of a word (or more precisely lexeme) to reflect grammatical (that is, relational) information, such as gender, tense, number or person. ...
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The Romance languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, comprise all languages that descended from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. ...
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An adjective is a part of speech which modifies a noun, usually describing it or making its meaning more specific. ...
In many languages, including a number of Indo-European languages, there is also a dual number (used for indicating two objects). Some other grammatical numbers present in various languages include nullar (for no objects), trial (for three objects) and paucal (for a few objects). In languages with dual, trial, or paucal numbers, plural refers to numbers higher than those (i.e. more than two, more than three, or many). However, numbers besides singular, plural, and to a lesser extent dual, are extremely rare. Languages with noun classifiers such as Chinese and Japanese lack any significant grammatical number at all. They are likely to have plural personal pronouns though. The Indo-European languages comprise a family of several hundred related languages and dialects [1], including most of the major languages of Europe, as well as many spoken in the Indian subcontinent (South Asia), the Iranian plateau (Southwest Asia), and Central Asia. ...
In addition to singular and plural forms of nouns and pronouns, some languages also have dual forms. ...
In grammar, nullar number refers to where nouns take a special form when referring to zero objects. ...
In linguistics, the trial grammatical number is a grammatical number referring to three things, as opposed to singular and plural. Trial linguistic structures do not exist in English, nor do dual numbers. ...
In linguistics, paucal is a number that specifies a few things. ...
A classifier, in linguistics, is a word or morpheme used in some languages in certain contexts to indicate the word class of a noun. ...
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a word that usually takes the place of a noun or noun phrase that was previously mentioned (such as she, it) or that refers to something or someone (I, me, you). Pronouns are often one of the basic parts of speech of the...
Some languages distinguish between a plural and a greater plural. A greater plural refers to an abnormally large number for the object of discussion. It should also be noted that the distinction between the paucal, the plural, and the greater plural is often relative to the type of object under discussion. For example, for oranges the paucal number might imply less than ten, whereas for the population of a country it might be used for a few hundred thousand.
The Austronesian language Sursurunga has singular, dual, paucal, greater paucal, and plural. Lihir, another Austronesian language, has singular, dual, trial, paucal, and plural. These are probably languages with the most complex grammatical number. Reports on existence of quadral (four) are considered false. The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific ( with a few members spoken on continental Asia). ...
Languages having only a singular and plural form may still differ in their treatment of zero. For example, in English, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and European Portuguese, the plural form is used for zero or more than one, and the singular for one thing only. By contrast, in French, the singular form is used for zero. Some languages, such as Latvian, have a special form (the nullar) for zero, as well as the singular and plural, as discussed above.
An interesting difference from Romance/Germanic languages is found in some Slavic and Baltic languages. Here, the final digits of the number determine its form. For example, Polish has singular and plural, and a special form (paucal) for numbers where the last digit is 2, 3 or 4, (excluding endings of 12, 13 and 14). In addition, Slovenian preserved pure dual, using it for numbers ending in 2. 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). For example, there are two ways to say leaves: lišće (collective) is used in "Leaves are falling from the trees", but listovi (counting) is used in "Those are some beautiful leaves". See discussion for an alternate interpretation of this phenomenon. Countries where a West Slavic language is the national language Countries where an East Slavic language is the national language Countries where a South Slavic language is the national language The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages), a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup...
The Baltic languages are a group of related languages belonging to the Indo-European language family and spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. ...
Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian (also Croatian or Serbian, Serbian or Croatian) (srpskohrvatski or cрпÑкохрватÑки or hrvatskosrpski or hrvatski ili srpski or srpski ili hrvatski), earlier also Serbo-Croat, was an official language of Yugoslavia (along with Slovenian, Macedonian). ...
Collective nouns are subject-specific words used to define a grouping of people, animals, objects or concepts. ...
In English, mass nouns and abstract nouns have plurals in some rare instances. The phrase "by the waters of Babylon" is merely poetic, but the mass noun "water" takes a plural to signify the water drawn from different sources, with different trace minerals, as in the phrase "Different waters make for different beers." Similarly, the abstract noun "physics" is usually a vast unitary concept, but in its recent meaning of computer game subroutines, a plural sense is possible for different workings of physics, though without a change in inflection: "Throughout the history of the game series, the physics have improved." It has been suggested that Count noun be merged into this article or section. ...
An abstract noun is a noun that refers to an idea, emotion, feeling, or quality that cannot be detected by the five senses (touch, taste, hearing, sight, smell), compared with a concrete noun. ...
Sources
- Corbett, Greville. Number (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge University Press, 2000.
- GNU gettext utilities (section 10.2.5 - Additional functions for plural forms) (Treatment of zero and the plurality based on the final digits)
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