Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
Regularization is a linguistic phenomenon observed in language acquisition, language development, and language change typified by the replacement of irregular forms in morphology or syntax by regular ones. Examples are "gooses" instead of "geese" in child speech and replacement of the Middle English plural form for "cow", "kine", with "cows". [1]
An archaic set of second-person pronouns used for singular reference is thou, thee, thyself, thy, thine, which are still used in religious services and can be seen in older works, such as Shakespeare's—in such texts, the you set of pronouns are used for plural reference, or with singular reference as a formal V-form.
When a language becomes less synthetic, it is often a matter of morphological leveling. An example is the conjugation of English verbs, which has become almost unchanging today (see also null morpheme ), thus contrasting sharply, for example, with Latin , in which one verb has dozens of forms, each one expressing a different tense , aspect ...
A study of 17th-century American English found the form be used for the 1st and 3rd person plural present; [15]: 192–193 was for the 3rd person plural preterite; [15]: 194 art and are for the 2nd person singular present; wast and wert for the 2nd person singular preterite; [15]: 193 and dost and hast (2nd person) and doth and hath (3rd person ...
These pluralize only under special circumstances, and no plural form of the word can be found in contemporary texts. [7] The Latin word vīrus was a neuter noun of the second declension, but neuter second declension nouns ending in -us (rather than -um) are rare enough that inferring rules is difficult
One of Gleason's hand-drawn panels from the original Wug Test [note 1]. Gleason devised the Wug Test as part of her earliest research (1958), which used nonsense words to gauge children's acquisition of morphological rules—for example, the "default" rule that most English plurals are formed by adding an /s/, /z/, or /ɪz/ sound depending on the final consonant, e.g. hat–hats, eye ...
Proper nouns that are plural in form take a plural verb in both AmE and BrE; for example, The Beatles are a well-known band; The Diamondbacks are the champions, with one major exception: in American English, the United States is almost universally used with a singular verb.