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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 ...
number: singular contrasts with plural; Nouns belong to one of two classes: animate or inanimate. Originally the grammatical distinction between these were that inanimate nouns had no plural forms, but in most modern dialects both animate and inanimate nouns are pluralizable. Nominal morphology is mostly suffixing. Some irregular formations exist.
Though both common nouns and pronouns show number distinction in English, they do so differently: common nouns tend to take an inflectional ending (–s) to mark plurals, but pronouns typically do not. (The pronoun one is an exception, as in I like those ones.) English pronouns are also more limited than common nouns in their ability to take ...
Latin has different singular and plural forms for nouns, verbs, and adjectives, in contrast to English where adjectives do not change for number. [10] Tundra Nenets can mark singular and plural on nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and postpositions. [11] However, the most common part of speech to show a number distinction is pronouns.
In Latin, most second declension masculine nouns ending in -us form their plural in -i. However, some Latin nouns ending in -us are not second declension (cf. Latin grammar). 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 ...
More generally the ending can be applied to noun phrases (as in the man you saw yesterday's sister); see below. The possessive form can be used either as a determiner (Manyanda's cat) or as a noun phrase (Manyanda's is the one next to Jane's). The status of the possessive as an affix or a clitic is the subject of debate.
And in a language of grammatical gender, if there's lots of other objects around, saying it with the right gendered article or the right gendered pronoun will immediately disambiguate, make it a ...
The grammar of Old English differs greatly from Modern English, predominantly being much more inflected.As a Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as ...