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The plural of individual letters is usually written with -'s: [22] there are two h's in this sentence; mind your p's and q's; dot the i's and cross the t's. Some people extend this use of the apostrophe to other cases, such as plurals of numbers written in figures (e.g. "1990's"), words used as terms (e.g. "his writing uses a lot of but's").
The demonstrative pronouns of English are this (plural these), and that (plural those), as in these are good, I like that. All four words can also be used as determiners (followed by a noun), as in those cars. They can also form the alternative pronominal expressions this/that one, these/those ones.
Proper nouns that are plural in form take a plural verb in both AmE and BrE; for example, The Beatles are a well-known band; The Diamondbacks are the champions, with one major exception: in American English, the United States is almost universally used with a singular verb.
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).
The distributive plural may be a part of even larger paradigms: in Urarina, intransitive verbs describing a positional state (such as "it is lying on its side") distinguish between singular, dual, paucal, plural (4+), and distributive plural. [304]
This makes writing English more complex, but arguably makes reading English more efficient. [ 11 ] [ 12 ] However, very abstract underlying representations, such as that of Chomsky & Halle (1968) or of underspecification theories, are sometimes considered too abstract to accurately reflect the communicative competence of native speakers.
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The grammar of Old English differs greatly from Modern English, predominantly being much more inflected.As a Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as ...