Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
For example, in Spanish, nouns composed of a verb and its plural object usually have the verb first and noun object last (e.g. the legendary monster chupacabras, literally "sucks-goats", or in a more natural English formation "goatsucker") and the plural form of the object noun is retained in both the singular and plural forms of the compound ...
In linguistics, a broken plural (or internal plural) is an irregular plural form of a noun or adjective found in the Semitic languages and other Afroasiatic languages such as the Berber languages. Broken plurals are formed by changing the pattern of consonants and vowels inside the singular form.
For example, the singular nouns cat, dog, and bush are pluralized as cats (s = /s/), dogs (s = /z/), and bushes (es = /əz/), respectively. 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.
The plural form of a noun is usually created by adding the suffix-(e)s. The pronouns have irregular plurals, as in "I" versus "we", because they are ancient and frequently used words going back to when English had a well developed system of declension. English verbs distinguish singular from plural number in the third person present tense ("He ...
Modern English has only two vestiges of the weak noun inflection in common use: ox, whose plural is oxen, and child, whose plural is children, the latter being a double plural. Additionally, the words aurochs and brother have the optional plural forms aurochsen and brethren, the latter also being a double plural.
A castrated male steer, occasionally a female or in some areas an intact bull that is trained and kept for draft or riding purposes is called an ox (plural oxen); ox may also be used to refer to some carcass products from any adult cattle, such as ox-hide, ox-blood, oxtail, or ox-liver. [3] A springer is a cow or heifer that is close to calving ...
In grammar, zero plural also refers to the irregular plural in which the Standard English singular form and the plural form are the same: I have one sheep or I have two sheep. [ 14 ] Zero possessive marking is the absence of the possessive marker ’s in some nonstandard varieties of English, such as African American Vernacular English :
For example, the singular number of English nouns is shown by a null morpheme that contrasts with the plural morpheme -s. cat = cat + -∅ = ROOT ("cat") + SINGULAR; cats = cat + -s = ROOT ("cat") + PLURAL; In addition, there are some cases in English where a null morpheme indicates plurality in nouns that take on irregular plurals.