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English plurals include the plural forms of English nouns and English determiners. This article discusses the variety of ways in which English plurals are formed from the corresponding singular forms, as well as various issues concerning the usage of singulars and plurals in English. For plurals of pronouns, see English personal pronouns.
Language Teaching is an academic journal in language education that publishes approximately 30 research articles a year in the field of second-language teaching and learning. Published by Cambridge University Press, papers focus on specific topics, languages and countries. There are also replication, research articles, survey of doctoral ...
In the English sentence above, the plural suffix -s is added to the noun cowboy. In the equivalent in Western Apache, a head-marking language, a plural affix da-is added to the verb yiłch'ígó'aah "he is teaching him", resulting in yiłch'ídagó'aah "he is teaching them" while noun idilohí "cowboy" is unmarked for number.
Some languages may possess a massive plural and a numerative plural, the first implying a large mass and the second implying division (like the English modifer "respective[ly]"). For example, "the [combined] waters of the Atlantic Ocean" versus, "the waters of [each of] the Great Lakes [respectively]".
The Ainu language of Japan has a closed class of 'count verbs'. The majority of these end in -pa, an iterative suffix that has become lexicalized on some verbs. For example, kor means 'to have something or a few things', and kor-pa 'to have many things'; there are also causative forms of the latter, kor-pa-re 'to give (one person) many things', kor-pa-yar 'to give (several people) many things'.
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 Cambridge Grammar of the English Language argues that English has a "weakly grammaticalized" gender, which is based only on pronoun agreement. This gender system involves two subsystems: one involving the distinctions between the personal pronouns he , she , and it and another involving the distinctions between the relative pronouns who and ...
In a language with noun classes, each noun typically belongs to one and only one class, which is usually shown by a word form or an accompanying article and functions grammatically. The same referent can be referred to by nouns with different noun classes, such as die Frau "the woman" (feminine) and das Weib "the woman (archaic, pejorative ...