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tā He 打 dǎ hit 人。 rén person 他 打 人。 tā dǎ rén He hit person He hits someone. Chinese can also be considered a topic-prominent language: there is a strong preference for sentences that begin with the topic, usually "given" or "old" information; and end with the comment, or "new" information. Certain modifications of the basic subject–verb–object order are permissible and ...
Greater plural is a number larger than and beyond plural. In various forms across different languages, it has also been called the global plural, the remote plural, the plural of abundance, [173] the unlimited plural, [174] and the superplural. [175] For example, in Tswana: [176] ntša - "dog" (singular) dintša - "dogs" (plural)
The distinction between Bokmål and Nynorsk exists primarily for written Norwegian (most Norwegians speak dialects that differ from the standard written forms), and the T–V rules are the same for both forms—except that Bokmål uses the third person plural to indicate politeness (as in German), while Nynorsk uses the second person plural (as ...
Dual (abbreviated DU) is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and plural.When a noun or pronoun appears in dual form, it is interpreted as referring to precisely two of the entities (objects or persons) identified by the noun or pronoun acting as a single unit or in unison.
In Chinese, a numeral cannot usually quantify a noun by itself; instead, the language relies on classifiers, commonly also referred to as measure words. [note 2] When a noun is preceded by a number, a demonstrative such as this or that, or certain quantifiers such as every, a classifier must normally be inserted before the noun. [1]
For an example, see Standard Chinese phonology#Zero onset. In morphology, a zero morph, [1] consisting of no phonetic form, is an allomorph of a morpheme that is otherwise realized in speech. In the phrase two sheep-∅, the plural marker is a zero morph (see nouns with identical singular and plural forms), which is an allomorph of -s as in two ...
These cases are described with the terms collective number and singulative number. Some languages may possess a massive plural and a numerative plural, the first implying a large mass and the second implying division (like the English modifer "respective[ly]"). For example, "the [combined] waters of the Atlantic Ocean" versus, "the waters of ...
Clusivity is nonetheless a very common language feature overall. Some languages with more than one plural number make the clusivity distinction only in, for example, the dual but not in the greater plural, but other languages make it in all numbers. In the table below, the plural forms are the ones preferentially listed.