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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 ...
One example is the Correlative Conditional construction, found in the proverbial expression The bigger they come, the harder they fall. [ 15 ] [ 16 ] [ 17 ] Construction grammarians point out that this is not merely a fixed phrase; the Correlative Conditional is a general pattern ( The Xer, the Yer ) with "slots" that can be filled by almost ...
In linguistics, grammatical number is a feature of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). [1] English and many other languages present number categories of singular or plural. Some languages also have a dual, trial and paucal number or other arrangements.
These words are usually marked in dictionaries with the phrase "plural in form but singular in construction" (or similar wording). Others, such as aesthetics, are less strongly or consistently felt as singular; for the latter type, the dictionary phrase "plural in form but singular or plural in construction" recognizes variable usage.
Nouns have distinct singular and plural forms; that is, they decline to reflect their grammatical number; consider the difference between book and books. In addition, a few English pronouns have distinct nominative (also called subjective ) and oblique (or objective) forms; that is, they decline to reflect their relationship to a verb or ...
"(A) student(s) read (a) book(s)." 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).
A singular term is a paradigmatic referring device in a language. Singular terms are defined as expressions that purport to denote or designate particular individual people, places, or other objects. They contrast with general terms (such as "car" or "chair") which can apply to more than one thing. [1]
Strawson gives the example "the table is covered with books". Under Russell's theory, for such a sentence to be true there would have to be only one table in all of existence. But by uttering a phrase such as "the table is covered with books", the speaker is referring to a particular table: for instance, one that is in the vicinity of the speaker.