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For example, in Spanish, nouns composed of a verb and its plural object usually have the verb first and noun object last (e.g. the legendary monster chupacabras, literally "sucks-goats", or in a more natural English formation "goatsucker") and the plural form of the object noun is retained in both the singular and plural forms of the compound ...
Punctuation can be used to introduce ambiguity or misunderstandings where none needed to exist. One well known example, [17] for comedic effect, is from A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare (ignoring the punctuation provides the alternate reading).
Proper nouns that are plural in form take a plural verb in both AmE and BrE; for example, The Beatles are a well-known band; The Diamondbacks are the champions, with one major exception: in American English, the United States is almost universally used with a singular verb.
For example, bus is a shortened form of omnibus 'for everyone', the ablative (and dative) plural of omnis, and ignoramus is a verb form, 'we do not know'. Syllabus is a Late Latin (16th c.) word, derived from a misreading of the Greek sittybos "table of contents"; since it is not a classical word, some argue that it does not have a classical ...
The third-person form they is used with both plural and singular referents. Historically, singular they was restricted to quantificational constructions such as Each employee should clean their desk and referential cases where the referent's gender was unknown. However, it is increasingly used when the referent's gender is irrelevant or when ...
The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun. This default quantity is most commonly one (a form that represents this default quantity of one is said to be of singular number). Therefore, plurals most typically denote two or more of something, although they may also denote ...
ka tama-ŋɔ river-prox. in- ka this ka tama- ā -ŋɔ river-pl-prox. in- ka - ā these ka tama-ŋɔ in- ka / ka tama- ā -ŋɔ in- ka - ā river-prox. this / river-pl-prox. these In this example, what is copied is not a prefix, but rather the initial syllable of the head "river". By language Languages can have no conventional agreement whatsoever, as in Japanese or Malay ; barely any, as in ...
The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and ...