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In American English (AmE), collective nouns are almost always singular in construction: the committee was unable to agree. However, when a speaker wishes to emphasize that the individuals are acting separately, a plural pronoun may be employed with a singular or plural verb: the team takes their seats, rather than the team takes its seats.
The plural verb forms are often used in British English with the singular forms of these countable nouns (e.g., "The team have finished the project."). Conversely, in the English language as a whole, singular verb forms can often be used with nouns ending in "-s" that were once considered plural (e.g., "Physics is my
Linguistics generally concerns itself with the natural, spoken language, and not with spelling conventions in the written language. The verb to go is often given as an example of a verb with an irregular present tense conjugation, on account of adding "-es" instead of just "-s" for the third person singular conjugation. However, this is merely ...
A famous example for lexical ambiguity is the following sentence: "Wenn hinter Fliegen Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen hinterher.", meaning "When flies fly behind flies, then flies fly in pursuit of flies." [39] [circular reference] It takes advantage of some German nouns and corresponding verbs being homonymous. While not noticeable ...
A verb together with its dependents, excluding its subject, may be identified as a verb phrase (although this concept is not acknowledged in all theories of grammar [23]). A verb phrase headed by a finite verb may also be called a predicate. The dependents may be objects, complements, and modifiers (adverbs or adverbial phrases).
For example, in Ancient Greek neuter plurals took a singular verb. [325] The plural form of a pronoun may also be applied to a single individual as a sign of importance, respect or generality, as in the pluralis majestatis , the T–V distinction , and the generic "you" , found in many languages, or, in English, when using the singular "they ...
A regular English verb has only one principal part, from which all the forms of the verb can be derived.This is the base form or dictionary form.For example, from the base form exist, all the inflected forms of the verb (exist, exists, existed, existing) can be predictably derived.
This is similar to the use of honorific constructions in the Toda language, where subject-verb agreement for number is generally marked by different verb conjugations, but there are exceptions with certain honorific forms. For example, consider the following verb forms for the verb "to give" in Toda: kwēś-(non-honorific singular form)