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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 ...
In linguistics, a broken plural (or internal plural) is an irregular plural form of a noun or adjective found in the Semitic languages and other Afroasiatic languages such as the Berber languages. Broken plurals are formed by changing the pattern of consonants and vowels inside the singular form.
The plural form of a noun is usually created by adding the suffix-(e)s. The pronouns have irregular plurals, as in "I" versus "we", because they are ancient and frequently used words going back to when English had a well developed system of declension. English verbs distinguish singular from plural number in the third person present tense ("He ...
Syntax tree showing how spellout and the elsewhere principle allow irregular plurals in English. The structure of irregular plural nouns in English, and why they surface in the lexicon can be explained using a nanosyntactic approach. For example, the plural of mouse is not *mouses (* indicates ungrammaticality), it is mice.
For example, Polish and Russian use different forms of nouns with the numerals 2, 3, or 4 (and higher numbers ending with these [citation needed]) than with the numerals 5, 6, etc. (genitive singular in Russian and nominative plural in Polish in the former case, genitive plural in the latter case). Also some nouns may follow different ...
An irregular paradigm is one in which the derived forms of a word cannot be deduced by simple rules from the base form. For example, someone who knows only a little English can deduce that the plural of girl is girls but cannot deduce that the plural of man is men.
For example, the singular nouns cat, dog, and bush are pluralized as cats (s = /s/), dogs (s = /z/), and bushes (es = /əz/), respectively. Irregularly, English nouns are marked as plural in other ways, often inheriting the plural morphology of older forms of English or the languages that they are borrowed from.
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 ...