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For example, because martial is a postpositive adjective in the phrase court-martial, the plural is courts-martial, the suffix being attached to the noun rather than the adjective. This pattern holds for most postpositive adjectives, with the few exceptions reflecting overriding linguistic processes such as rebracketing .
For example, third declension neuter nouns such as opus and corpus have plurals opera and corpora, and fourth declension masculine and feminine nouns such as sinus and tribus have plurals sinūs and tribūs. Some English words derive from Latin idiosyncratically. For example, bus is a shortened form of omnibus 'for everyone', the ablative (and ...
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 ...
Types and examples. Oxymorons in the narrow sense are a rhetorical device used deliberately by the speaker and intended to be understood as such by the listener. In a more extended sense, the term "oxymoron" has also been applied to inadvertent or incidental contradictions, as in the case of "dead metaphors" ("barely clothed" or "terribly good").
Nonce word. In linguistics, a nonce word —also called an occasionalism —is any word (lexeme), or any sequence of sounds or letters, created for a single occasion or utterance but not otherwise understood or recognized as a word in a given language. [1][2] Nonce words have a variety of functions and are most commonly used for humor, poetry ...
e. English nouns form the largest category of words in English, both in the number of different words and how often they are used in typical texts. The three main categories of English nouns are common nouns, proper nouns, and pronouns. A defining feature of English nouns is their ability to inflect for number, as through the plural – s morpheme.
A plurale tantum (Latin for 'plural only'; pl. pluralia tantum) is a noun that appears only in the plural form and does not have a singular variant for referring to a single object. In a less strict usage of the term, it can also refer to nouns whose singular form is rarely used. 'Putting on pants' is correct, 'putting on pant' sounds odd.
Zero-marking in English is the indication of a particular grammatical function by the absence of any morpheme (word, prefix, or suffix). The most common types of zero-marking in English involve zero articles, zero relative pronouns, and zero subordinating conjunctions. Examples are I like cats in which the absence of the definite article, the ...