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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,
The Latin word vīrus was a neuter noun of the second declension, but neuter second declension nouns ending in -us (rather than -um) are rare enough that inferring rules is difficult. (One rare attested plural, pelage as a plural of pelagus, is borrowed from Greek, so does not give guidance for virus.)
The collective presents similar issues as the distributive in its potential classification as grammatical number, including the fact that some languages allow both collective and plural markers on the same words. Adding a collective to a plural word does not change the number of referents, only how those referents are conceptualized. [315]
See List of English words with disputed usage for words that are used in ways that are deprecated by some usage writers but are condoned by some dictionaries. There may be regional variations in grammar , orthography , and word-use , especially between different English-speaking countries.
An example of a plural is the English word boys, ... A Grammar of the English Language, Volume 1: Parts of Speech, D.C. Heath and Company, 1935;
The first published English grammar was a Pamphlet for Grammar of 1586, written by William Bullokar with the stated goal of demonstrating that English was just as rule-based as Latin. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534), used in English schools at that time, having been ...
For example, a noun or noun phrase cannot be both singular and plural, since these are both values of the "number" category. It can, however, be both plural and feminine, since these represent different categories (number and gender). Categories may be described and named with regard to the type of meanings that they are used to express.
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.