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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.
In linguistics, a collective noun is a word referring to a collection of things taken as a whole. Most collective nouns in everyday speech are not specific to one kind of thing. [1] For example, the collective noun "group" can be applied to people ("a group of people"), or dogs ("a group of dogs"), or objects ("a group of stones").
The collective presents similar issues as the distributive in its potential classification as grammatical number, including the fact that some languages allow both collective and plural markers on the same words. Adding a collective to a plural word does not change the number of referents, only how those referents are conceptualized. [315]
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 grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, such as living creatures, places, actions, ... Collective nouns are nouns that ...
A collective noun is singular when thought of as a unit and plural when the individuals are considered. [5] - The jury has arrived at a unanimous decision. - The committee are divided in their opinion. - His family is quite large. - His family have given him full support in his times of grief. - There's a huge audience in the gallery today.
For example, with collective nouns such as committee, which denote a unit composed of multiple individuals, agreement can either be singular because the noun is morphologically singular (e.g., The committee has not yet come to a decision) or plural because it is semantically plural (e.g.,The committee have not yet come to a decision). [26]
English grammar is the set of structural rules of the English language. ... Nouns, verbs, adjectives ... See English plural § Singulars with collective meaning ...