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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.
With exceptions such as usage in The New York Times, the names of sports teams are usually treated as plurals even if the form of the name is singular. [5] The difference occurs for all nouns of multitude, both general terms such as team and company and proper nouns (for example where a place name is used to refer to a sports team). For instance,
Broken plurals are formed by changing the pattern of consonants and vowels inside the singular form. They contrast with sound plurals (or external plurals), which are formed by adding a suffix , but are also formally distinct from phenomena like the Germanic umlaut , a form of vowel mutation used in plural forms in Germanic languages.
In English, the most common formation of plural nouns is by adding an -s suffix to the singular noun. (For details and different cases, see English plurals.) Just like in English, noun plurals in French, Spanish, and Portuguese are also typically formed by adding an -s suffix to the lemma form, sometimes combining it with an additional vowel ...
A third model is to categorize the apparent trial/quadral/quintal forms as "cardinal plurals", or forms of the grammatical plural number where the number of people is specified. [170] Other authors have treated these concepts as perfectly equivalent, referring to pronoun numeral incorporation while still applying the terms quadral and quintal.
English nouns are not marked for case as they are in some languages, but they have possessive forms, through the addition of -'s (as in John's, children's) or just an apostrophe (with no change in pronunciation) in the case of -[e]s plurals (the dogs' owners) and sometimes other words ending with -s (Jesus' love).
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).
Nanosyntax is a theory that seeks to fill in holes left by other theories when they seek to explain phenomena in language. The most notable phenomena that nanosyntax tackles is that of irregular conjugation. [2] For example, "goose" is irregular in that its plural form is not "gooses", but rather, "geese". This poses a problem to simple syntax ...