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Some of these nouns, for example staff, [1]: 24 actually combine with plural verbs most of the time. In American English (AmE), collective nouns are almost always singular in construction: the committee was unable to agree.
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 ...
In linguistics, a collective noun is a word referring to a collection of things taken as a whole. Most collective nouns in everyday speech are not specific to one kind of thing. [1] For example, the collective noun "group" can be applied to people ("a group of people"), or dogs ("a group of dogs"), or objects ("a group of stones").
As an example, consider the English sentences below: That apple on the table is fresh. Those two apples on the table are fresh. The quantity of apples is marked on the noun—"apple" singular number (one item) vs. "apples" plural number (more than one item)—on the demonstrative, that/those, and on the verb, is/are.
This is a non-exhaustive list of copulae in the English language, i.e. words used to link the subject of a sentence with a predicate (a subject complement). Because many of these copulative verbs may be used non-copulatively, examples are provided. Also, there can be other copulative verbs depending on the context and the meaning of the ...
In languages where the verb is inflected, it often agrees with its primary argument (the subject) in person, number or gender. With the exception of the verb to be, English shows distinctive agreements only in the third person singular, present tense form of verbs, which are marked by adding "-s" ( walks) or "-es" (fishes).
A small class of embedding verbs, however, may form compounds with an embedded verb stem of a shape determined by the embedding or matrix verb. Two major classes of matrix verb exist, those that categorize for an embedded base 2 stem (the perfective stem ) followed by the ligature -t(i)- , and those that categorize for a verb inflected in the ...
Verbs also have a past participle formed with a suffix and a present participle form comprising the verbal noun preceded by the particle o, which causes a mixed mutation. Most verbs are regular and stray little from the usual patterns. [2] The table shows and example of the regular verb debriñ "eat" (verbal stem debr-).