Plural
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Grammatical features |
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The plural (sometimes abbreviated as pl., pl, or PL), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun. This default quantity is most commonly one (a form that represents this default quantity of one is said to be of singular number). Therefore, plurals most typically denote two or more of something, although they may also denote fractional, zero or negative amounts. An example of a plural is the English word cats, which corresponds to the singular cat.
Words of other types, such as verbs, adjectives and pronouns, also frequently have distinct plural forms, which are used in agreement with the number of their associated nouns.
Some languages also have a dual (denoting exactly two of something) or other systems of number categories. However, in English and many other languages, singular and plural are the only grammatical numbers, except for possible remnants of dual number in pronouns such as both and either.
Use in systems of grammatical number
In many languages, there is also a
Some languages (like Mele-Fila) distinguish between a plural and a greater plural. A greater plural refers to an abnormally large number for the object of discussion. The distinction between the paucal, the plural, and the greater plural is often relative to the type of object under discussion. For example, in discussing oranges, the paucal number might imply fewer than ten, whereas for the population of a country, it might be used for a few hundred thousand.
The Austronesian languages of Sursurunga and Lihir have extremely complex grammatical number systems, with singular, dual, paucal, greater paucal, and plural.
Traces of the dual and paucal can be found in some Slavic and Baltic languages (apart from those that preserve the dual number, such as Slovene). These are known as "pseudo-dual" and "pseudo-paucal" grammatical numbers. 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 declension patterns when denoting objects which are typically referred to in pairs. For example, in Polish, the noun "oko", among other meanings, may refer to a human or animal eye or to a drop of oil on water. The plural of "oko" in the first meaning is "oczy" (even if actually referring to more than two eyes), while in the second it is "oka" (even if actually referring to exactly two drops).
Traces of dual can also be found in Modern Hebrew. Biblical Hebrew had grammatical dual via the suffix -ạyim as opposed to ־ים -īm for masculine words. Contemporary use of a true dual number in Hebrew is chiefly used in words regarding time and numbers. However, in Biblical and Modern Hebrew, the pseudo-dual as plural of "eyes" עין / עינים ʿạyin / ʿēnạyim "eye / eyes" as well as "hands", "legs" and several other words are retained. For further information, see Dual (grammatical number) § Hebrew.
Certain nouns in some languages have the unmarked form referring to multiple items, with an inflected form referring to a single item. These cases are described with the terms collective number and singulative number. Some languages may possess a massive plural and a numerative plural, the first implying a large mass and the second implying division. For example, "the waters of the Atlantic Ocean" versus, "the waters of [each of] the Great Lakes".
Ghil'ad Zuckermann uses the term superplural to refer to massive plural. He argues that the Australian Aboriginal Barngarla language has four grammatical numbers: singular, dual, plural and superplural.[1]: 227–228 For example:
- wárraidya "emu" (singular)
- wárraidyalbili "two emus" (dual)
- wárraidyarri "emus" (plural)
- wárraidyailyarranha "a lot of emus", "heaps of emus" (superplural)[1]: 228
Formation of plurals
A given language may make plural forms of nouns by various types of
In English, the most common formation of plural nouns is by adding an -s suffix to the singular noun. (For details and different cases, see English plurals). Just like in English, noun plurals in French, Spanish and Portuguese are also typically formed by adding an -s suffix to the lemma form, sometimes combining it with an additional vowel. (In French, however, this plural suffix is often not pronounced.) This construction is also found in German and Dutch, but only in some nouns. Suffixing is cross-linguistically the most common method of forming plurals.
In Welsh, the reference form, or default quantity, of some nouns is plural, and the singular form is formed from that, eg llygod, mice; llygoden, mouse; erfin, turnips; erfinen, turnip.
Plural forms of other parts of speech
In many languages, words other than nouns may take plural forms, these being used by way of
degree of comparison of adjectives, etc.)
Verbs often agree with their subject in number (as well as in person and
sometimes gender). Examples of plural forms are the French mangeons, mangez, mangent – respectively the first-, second- and third-person plural of the present tense of the verb manger. In English a distinction is made in the third person between forms such as eats (singular) and eat (plural).
It is common for
In Welsh, a number of common prepositions also inflect to agree with the number, person, and sometimes gender of the noun or pronoun they govern.
Nouns lacking plural or singular form
Certain nouns do not form plurals. A large class of such nouns in many languages is that of
Certain
There are also nouns found exclusively or almost exclusively in the plural, such as the English scissors. These are referred to with the term
Usage of the plural
The plural is used, as a rule, for quantities other than one (and other than those quantities represented by other grammatical numbers, such as dual, which a language may possess). Thus it is frequently used with numbers higher than one (two cats, 101 dogs, four and a half hours) and for unspecified amounts of countable things (some men, several cakes, how many lumps?, birds have feathers). The precise rules for the use of plurals, however, depends on the language – for example Russian uses the genitive singular rather than the plural after certain numbers (see above).
Treatments differ in expressions of zero quantity: English often uses the plural in such expressions as no injuries and zero points, although no (and zero in some contexts) may also take a singular. In French, the singular form is used after zéro.
English also tends to use the plural with
In some languages, including English, expressions that appear to be singular in form may be treated as plural if they are used with a plural sense, as in the government are agreed. The reverse is also possible: the United States is a powerful country. See
POS tagging
In part-of-speech tagging notation, tags are used to distinguish different types of plurals based on their grammatical and semantic context.[2] Resolution varies, for example the Penn-Treebank tagset (~36 tags) has two tags: NNS - noun, plural, and NPS - Proper noun, plural,[3] while the CLAWS 7 tagset (~149 tags)[4] uses six: NN2 - plural common noun, NNL2 - plural locative noun, NNO2 - numeral noun, plural, NNT2 - temporal noun, plural, NNU2 - plural unit of measurement, NP2 - plural proper noun.
See also
- Double plural
- Reduplicated plural
- Partitive plural
- Plural quantification
- Pluractionality
- Pluralis majestatis
- Romance plurals
Notes
- ^ a b Zuckermann, Ghil'ad 2020, Revivalistics: From the Genesis of Israeli to Language Reclamation in Australia and Beyond, Oxford University Press. (ISBN 9780199812790 / ISBN 9780199812776)
- ^ "POS tags". Sketch Engine. Lexical Computing. 2018-03-27. Retrieved 2018-04-06.
- ^ "The Penn Treebank Tag Set". Archived from the original on 2010-09-09. Retrieved 2010-06-06.
- ^ "UCREL CLAWS7 Tagset". ucrel.lancs.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 19 October 2017. Retrieved 15 March 2018.
Further reading
- Corbett, Greville. Number (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge University Press, 2000.
- Huddleston, Rodney and Pullum, Geoffrey K., The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Cambridge University Press, Suffolk, UK, 2002
- Curme, George O., A Grammar of the English Language, Volume 1: Parts of Speech, D.C. Heath and Company, 1935
- Opdycke, John B., Harper's English Grammar, Harper & Row, New York, New York, 1965
- Jespersen, Otto, A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, v. II, George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London, 1928
- McDavid, Raven I. Jr. et al., The Plurals of Nouns of Measure in Spoken American English, Fries Festschrift, Ann Arbor, MI, 1963
- Xu, Dan. 2012. Plurality and classifiers across languages in China. Berlin: de Gruyter.
External links
- GNU gettext utilities (section 11.2.6 – Additional functions for plural forms) (Treatment of zero and the plurality based on the final digits)