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Suppletion (the use of the one word as the inflected form of another word): Serbo-Croatian: čov(j)ek "man" (singular) – ljudi "men, folks" (plural) [321] English: person (singular) - people (plural) (used colloquially. In formal and careful speech persons is still used as the plural of person while people also has its own plural in peoples.)
Words in one class can sometimes be derived from those in another. This has the potential to give rise to new words. For example, the noun aerobics has given rise to the adjective aerobicized. [3] Words combine to form phrases. A phrase typically serves the same function as a word from some particular word class. [3]
In many languages, numerals up to the base are a distinct part of speech, while the words for powers of the base belong to one of the other word classes. In English, these higher words are hundred 10 2 , thousand 10 3 , million 10 6 , and higher powers of a thousand ( short scale ) or of a million ( long scale —see names of large numbers ).
Although the use of terms varies from author to author, a distinction should be made between grammatical categories and lexical categories. Lexical categories (considered syntactic categories) largely correspond to the parts of speech of traditional grammar, and refer to nouns, adjectives, etc.
For example, most varieties of English use explicit plural morphemes (singular mango and plural mangoes), West Indian creole languages refer to plural objects without such morphology (I find one dozen mango.). [1] The lack of marking to show grammatical category or agreement is known as zero-marking or zero morpheme realization. [2]
The dative construction is a grammatical way of constructing a sentence using the dative case.A sentence is also said to be in dative construction if the subject and the object (direct or indirect) can switch their places for a given verb, without altering the verb's structure (subject becoming the new object, and the object becoming the new subject).
Unlike some common nouns, proper nouns do not typically show number contrast in English. Most proper nouns in English are singular and lack a plural form, though some may instead be plural and lack a singular form. For example, we typically expect Michigan but not *Michigans and the Philippines [b] but not *Philippine. Proper nouns also differ ...
In the case of object raising, the object of one verb can be the agent of another verb. For example, in we expect JJ to arrive at 2:00, JJ is the object of expect, but JJ is also the person who will be doing the arriving. [6] [p. 221] Similarly, in Japanese, the potential form of verbs can raise the object of the main verb to the subject ...