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Third, irregular plural nouns may be regularized and use the –s morpheme. This may happen when the plural is not otherwise marked (e.g., sheeps for sheep), when the plural is typically marked with a morpheme other than –s (e.g., oxes for oxen), or when the plural is typically formed through vowel mutation (e.g., foots for feet).
The plural may be used to emphasise the plurality of the attribute, especially in British English but very rarely in American English: a careers advisor, a languages expert. The plural is also more common with irregular plurals for various attributions: women killers are women who kill, whereas woman killers are those who kill women.
However, the opposite combination, a nonplural noun with a plural verb, is also possible, and can be variably interpreted as one, two, or a few. Zuni nouns have thus been described as having a "singular-paucal" versus plural distinction. [271] [272] Some nouns in Navajo have also been described as working this way, such as: [273]
The plural (sometimes abbreviated as pl., pl, or PL), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number.
The opposite of the diminutive form is the augmentative. In some contexts, diminutives are also employed in a pejorative sense to denote that someone or something is weak or childish. For example, one of the last Western Roman emperors was Romulus Augustus , but his name was diminutivized to "Romulus Augustulus" to express his powerlessness.
For this reason, many associate the pronoun with solemnity or formality. Many dialects have compensated for the lack of a singular/plural distinction caused by the disappearance of thou and ye through the creation of new plural pronouns or pronominals, such as yinz, yous [6] and y'all or the colloquial you guys ("you lot" in England).
Metaphysical pluralism in philosophy is the multiplicity of metaphysical models of the structure and content of reality, both as it appears and as logic dictates that it might be, [3] as is exhibited by the four related models in Plato's Republic [4] and as developed in the contrast between phenomenalism and physicalism.
Here, it is illustrated that both "students" and "books" act as bare neutral nouns that can behave as singular, plural, or a mass noun depending on the context. This allows for each sentence to have up to nine interpretations (any pair of three possibilities). This being said, a mass vs count distinction can exist when a classifier is added.