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The plural may be used to emphasise the plurality of the attribute, especially in British English but very rarely in American English: a careers advisor, a languages expert. The plural is also more common with irregular plurals for various attributions: women killers are women who kill, whereas woman killers are those who kill women.
Third, irregular plural nouns may be regularized and use the –s morpheme. This may happen when the plural is not otherwise marked (e.g., sheeps for sheep), when the plural is typically marked with a morpheme other than –s (e.g., oxes for oxen), or when the plural is typically formed through vowel mutation (e.g., foots for feet).
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.
The plural (sometimes abbreviated as pl., pl, or PL), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number.
Northern Gumuz is said to mark the plural and greater plural on verbs, [192] and Daatsʼiin is said to mark "three degrees of plurality" (plural, greater plural, and greatest plural) on verbs. [193] In both languages though, the "plural" is often actually a paucal, understood to mean about two to four.
Examples are stewardi (supposed plural of stewardess) and Elvi (as a plural for Elvis imitators). The Toyota corporation has determined that their Prius model should have the plural form Prii, even though the Latin word prius has a plural priora, the Lada Priora having prior claim to that name—though the common plural is "Priuses".
Here, it is illustrated that both "students" and "books" act as bare neutral nouns that can behave as singular, plural, or a mass noun depending on the context. This allows for each sentence to have up to nine interpretations (any pair of three possibilities). This being said, a mass vs count distinction can exist when a classifier is added.
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 ...