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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 logo Wiktionary is a sister project to Wikipedia intended to be a free wiki dictionary (including thesaurus and lexicon) in every language. ...
Number, in linguistics, is a grammatical category used to express the quantity of objects referred to by a noun. ...
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 (a word or phrase) 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. ...
Demonstratives are deictic words that indicate which entities a speaker refers to, and distinguishes those entities from others. ...
Inflection or inflexion refers to a modification or marking of a word (or more precisely lexeme) so that it reflects grammatical (i. ...
In the English language, nouns are inflected for grammatical number — that is, singular or plural. ...
The Romance languages, also called Romanic languages or New Latin languages, are a subset of the Italic languages, specifically the descendants of the Latin dialects spoken by the common people in what is known as Latin Europe (Italian/Portuguese/Spanish Europa latina, Catalan Europa llatina, French Europe latine, Romanian Europa...
An article is a word that is put next to a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. ...
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). The Indo-European languages are a group of several hundred languages and dialects (specifically 443 according to the SIL estimate), including most of the major language families of Europe, as well as many languages of Asia, which belong to a single superfamily. ...
Dual is the grammatical number used for two referents. ...
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. ...
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 and 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 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. ...
Lihir is a language of Papua New Guinea and is notable for having a trial plural. ...
However, numbers besides singular, plural, and to a lesser extent dual, are extremely rare. Furthermore, 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. 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...
Languages having only a singular and plural form may still differ in their treatment of zero. For example, in English, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, the plural form is used for zero or more than one, and the singular for one thing only. By contrast, in French and Brazilian Portuguese, 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.
Also, 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 for numbers where the last digit is 2,3 or 4, and the second last digit is not 1. Slovenian has one form for numbers congruent to 1 modulo 100, another for numbers congruent to 2 modulo 100, another for numbers congruent to either 3 or 4 modulo 100, and another form for all other numbers. In Croatian (in addition to the Polish 2,3,4), there is a plural for counting and a plural for not-counting. For example, there are two ways to say leaves: "lišće" is used in "Leaves are falling from the trees", but "listovi" is used in "Those are some beautiful leaves". The first plural is the more commonly used, and in general the two plurals are used with natural objects. The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages), a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia. ...
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. ...
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." In English grammar, a mass noun (also uncountable noun) is a type of noun that cannot be modified by a number without specifying a unit of measurement; thus mass nouns have singular but no plural forms. ...
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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