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Although the everyday meaning of plural is "more than one", the grammatical term has a slightly different technical meaning. In the English system of grammatical number, singular means "one (or minus one)", and plural means "not singular". In other words, plural means not just "more than one" but also "less than one (except minus one)".
The pronouns and verbs of Kalaw Lagaw Ya distinguish singular, dual, and plural, leaving no ambiguity between one and two in full sentences. [258] While Kalaw Lagaw Ya has the singular-dual in all nouns, Central Pame has it specifically in inanimate nouns, such as čihàgŋ, spoon(s) (one or two), and šihàgŋ, spoons (plural, three or more).
These are made as for nouns, by adding 's or just an apostrophe following a plural -s (see English possessive). The most commonly encountered possessive forms of the above pronouns are: one's, as in "One should mind one's own business." those derived from the singular indefinite pronouns ending in -one or -body: nobody's, someone's, etc.
Common fractions less than one tend to be used with singular expressions: half (of) a loaf, two-thirds of a mile. Negative numbers are usually treated the same as the corresponding positive ones: minus one degree, minus two degrees. Again, rules on such matters differ between languages.
Using singular verbs with "none" sounds find to me. To me, it's like using singular verbs with "no one", where both "none" and "no one" are not plural. I can't think of any cases where you would use a plural verb with "none" either. I might be wrong, so someone feel free to correct me.
Plural number is often said to mean more than one, [24] but, in fact, it restricts the denotation of the noun to the set of non-singularities. That is, in English, plural nouns are appropriate for quantities denoted by all the real numbers , including 0 and other quantities smaller than 1, except exactly ±1.
Although the pronouns everybody, everyone, nobody, and no one are singular in form and are used with a singular verb, these pronouns have an "implied plurality" that is somewhat similar to the implied plurality of collective or group nouns such as crowd or team, [b] and in some sentences where the antecedent is one of these "implied plural ...
Welsh has two systems of grammatical number, singular–plural and collective–singulative. Since the loss of the noun inflection system of earlier Celtic, plurals have become unpredictable and can be formed in several ways: by adding a suffix to the end of the word (most commonly -au), as in tad "father" and tadau "fathers", through vowel affection, as in bachgen "boy" and bechgyn "boys", or ...