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In linguistics, grammatical number is a feature of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). [1] English and many other languages present number categories of singular or plural. Some languages also have a dual, trial and paucal number or other arrangements.
Although English adjectives do not participate in the system of number the way determiners, nouns, and pronouns do, English adjectives may still express number semantically. For example, adjectives like several, various, and multiple are semantically plural, while those like single, lone, and unitary have singular semantics. [31]
For example, the adjective carnivorous is intersective, given the extension of carnivorous mammal is the intersection of the extensions of carnivorous and mammal (i.e., the set of all mammals who are carnivorous). An adjective is subsective if and only if the extension of its combination with a noun is a subset of the extension of the noun.
For example, "dozen" serves the function of a noun, "first" serves the function of an adjective, and "twice" serves the function of an adverb. In Old Church Slavonic , the cardinal numbers 5 to 10 were feminine nouns; when quantifying a noun, that noun was declined in the genitive plural like other nouns that followed a noun of quantity (one ...
These categories share features of case, gender, and number each of which are inflected with different suffixes. Nominals are seen as secondary inflection of agreement. Understanding the different noun classes and how they relate to gender and number is important because the agreement of adjectives will change depending on the type of noun. [4]
Ordinal indicator – Character(s) following an ordinal number (used when writing ordinal numbers, such as a super-script) Ordinal number – Generalization of "n-th" to infinite cases (the related, but more formal and abstract, usage in mathematics) Ordinal data, in statistics; Ordinal date – Date written as number of days since first day of ...
Adjectives agree in gender and number with the nouns that they modify in French. As with verbs, the agreements are sometimes only shown in spelling since forms that are written with different agreement suffixes are sometimes pronounced the same (e.g. joli , jolie ); although in many cases the final consonant is pronounced in feminine forms, but ...
Cardinal numerals are typically thought to express the exact number of the things represented by the noun, but this exactness is through implicature rather than necessity. In the clause five people complained, for example, the number of people complaining is usually thought to be exactly five. But technically, the proposition would still be ...