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The plural may be used to emphasise the plurality of the attribute, especially in British English but very rarely in American English: a careers advisor, a languages expert. The plural is also more common with irregular plurals for various attributions: women killers are women who kill, whereas woman killers are those who kill women.
The irregular form tends to indicate duration, whereas the regular form often describes a short-term action (The fire burned for weeks. vs. He burnt his finger. ), and in American English, the regular form is associated with the literal sense of a verb, while the irregular form with a figurative one.
See English plural § Singulars with collective meaning treated as plural. 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 ...
The plural form of a noun is usually created by adding the suffix-(e)s. The pronouns have irregular plurals, as in "I" versus "we", because they are ancient and frequently used words going back to when English had a well developed system of declension. English verbs distinguish singular from plural number in the third person present tense ("He ...
Nearly all of the basic irregular verbs are single-syllable words. Their irregular inflected forms are generally single-syllable also, except for the past participles in -en like chosen and risen. However, many additional irregular verbs are formed by adding prefixes to the basic ones: understand from stand, become from come, mistake from take ...
Therefore, plurals most typically denote two or more of something, although they may also denote fractional, zero or negative amounts. An example of a plural is the English word boys, which corresponds to the singular boy.
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.
The auxiliary language Interlingua has some irregular verbs, principally esser "to be", which has an irregular present tense form es "is" (instead of expected esse), an optional plural son "are", an optional irregular past tense era "was/were" (alongside regular esseva), and a unique subjunctive form sia (which can also function as an imperative).
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