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English plurals include the plural forms of English nouns and English determiners. This article discusses the variety of ways in which English plurals are formed from the corresponding singular forms, as well as various issues concerning the usage of singulars and plurals in English. For plurals of pronouns, see English personal pronouns.
plural of base / ˈ b eɪ s iː z / noun plural of basis: bass / ˈ b eɪ s / noun low in pitch / ˈ b æ s / noun a fish blessed / ˈ b l ɛ s ɪ d / adjective having divine aid / ˈ b l ɛ s t / verb past tense of bless: bow / ˈ b oʊ / noun a stringed weapon, or the initiator of sound in some stringed musical instruments. noun
A given language may make plural forms of nouns by various types of inflection, including the addition of affixes, like the English -(e)s and -ies suffixes, or ablaut, as in the derivation of the plural geese from goose, or a combination of the two.
Irregularly, English nouns are marked as plural in other ways, often inheriting the plural morphology of older forms of English or the languages that they are borrowed from. Plural forms from Old English resulted from vowel mutation (e.g., foot/feet), adding –en (e.g., ox/oxen), or making no change at all (e.g., this sheep/those sheep).
In the English sentence above, the plural suffix -s is added to the noun cowboy. In the equivalent in Western Apache, a head-marking language, a plural affix da-is added to the verb yiłch'ígó'aah "he is teaching him", resulting in yiłch'ídagó'aah "he is teaching them" while noun idilohí "cowboy" is unmarked for number.
Although English pronouns can have subject and object forms (he/him, she/her), nouns show only a singular/plural and a possessive/non-possessive distinction (e.g. chair, chairs, chair's, chairs'); there is no manifest difference in the form of chair between "The chair is here." (subject) and "I own the chair."
Basic English (a backronym for ... The grammar is based on English, but simplified. [9] Plural nouns ... As a teaching aid for English as a second language, Basic ...
Collins COBUILD – English Grammar London: Collins ISBN 0-00-370257-X second edition, 2005 ISBN 0-00-718387-9. Huddleston and Pullman say they found this grammar 'useful' in their Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, p. 1765. A CD-Rom version of the 1st edition is available in the Collins COBUILD Resource Pack ISBN 0-00-716921-3