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In linguistics, grammatical number is a feature of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). [1]
The word data is most often used as a singular collective mass noun in educated everyday usage. [1] [2] However, due to the history and etymology of the word, considerable controversy has existed on whether it should be considered a mass noun used with verbs conjugated in the singular, or should be treated as the plural of the now-rarely-used datum.
A singular term is a paradigmatic referring device in a language. Singular terms are defined as expressions that purport to denote or designate particular individual people, places, or other objects. They contrast with general terms (such as "car" or "chair") which can apply to more than one thing. [1]
In linguistics, a numeral in the broadest sense is a word or phrase that describes a numerical quantity.Some theories of grammar use the word "numeral" to refer to cardinal numbers that act as a determiner that specify the quantity of a noun, for example the "two" in "two hats".
The concept of a "mass noun" is a grammatical concept and is not based on the innate nature of the object to which that noun refers. For example, "seven chairs" and "some furniture" could refer to exactly the same objects, with "seven chairs" referring to them as a collection of individual objects but with "some furniture" referring to them as a single undifferentiated unit.
A word is a basic element of language that carries meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. [1] Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its definition and numerous attempts to find specific criteria of the concept remain controversial. [2]
For example, most varieties of English use explicit plural morphemes (singular mango and plural mangoes), West Indian creole languages refer to plural objects without such morphology (I find one dozen mango.). [1] The lack of marking to show grammatical category or agreement is known as zero-marking or zero morpheme realization. [2]
However, the term "collective noun" is often used to mean "mass noun" (even in some dictionaries) because users conflate two different kinds of verb number invariability: (a) that seen with mass nouns such as "water" or "furniture", with which only singular verb forms are used because the constituent matter is grammatically indivisible ...