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In British English (BrE), collective nouns can take either singular (formal agreement) or plural (notional agreement) verb forms, according to whether the emphasis is on the body as a whole or on the individual members respectively; compare a committee was appointed with the committee were unable to agree.
In Latin, specie is the ablative singular form, while species is the nominative form, which happens to be the same in both singular and plural. In English, species behaves similarly—as a noun with identical singular and plural—while specie is treated as a mass noun, referring to money in the form of coins (the idea is of "[payment] in kind ...
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 ...
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 ...
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.
Welsh has two systems of grammatical number, singular–plural and collective–singulative. Since the loss of the noun inflection system of earlier Celtic, plurals have become unpredictable and can be formed in several ways: by adding a suffix to the end of the word (most commonly -au), as in tad "father" and tadau "fathers", through vowel affection, as in bachgen "boy" and bechgyn "boys", or ...
Dual (abbreviated DU) is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and plural.When a noun or pronoun appears in dual form, it is interpreted as referring to precisely two of the entities (objects or persons) identified by the noun or pronoun acting as a single unit or in unison.
The word data is most often used as a singular collective mass noun in educated everyday usage. [1] [2] However, due to the history and etymology of the word, considerable controversy has existed on whether it should be considered a mass noun used with verbs conjugated in the singular, or should be treated as the plural of the now-rarely-used datum.