plural noun

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Plural is a grammatical number, typically referring to more than one of the referent in the real world. In the English language, singular and plural are the only grammatical numbers.

Examples of plural forms: car - cars, boat - boats, house - houses, friend - friends. Contents [hide] 1 Plurality 2 Zero 3 Instances 4 See also 5 References //

Plurality

In English, nouns, pronouns, and demonstratives inflect for plurality. (See English plural.) In many other languages, for example German and the various Romance languages, articles and adjectives also inflect for plurality. For example, in the English sentence "The brown cats are running.", only the noun and verb are inflected; but in German ("Die braune Katzen rennen."), Spanish ("Los gatos marrones corren.") or French ("Les chats brunes courent."), for example, every word (article, noun, adjective, and verb) is inflected.

COMOPASSA PARA O PLURAL IT IS AN EXPENSIVE CAR

Zero

Languages having only a singular and plural form may still differ in their treatment of zero. For example, in English, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, the plural form is used for zero or more than one, and the singular for one thing only. By contrast, in French, the singular form is used for zero.

An interesting difference from Romance/Germanic languages is found in some Slavic and Baltic languages. Here, the final digits of the number determine its form. For example, Polish has singular and plural, and a special form (paucal) for numbers where the last digit is 2, 3 or 4, (excluding endings of 12, 13 and 14). In addition, Slovenian preserved pure dual, using it for numbers ending in 2. In Serbo-Croatian (in addition to the paucal for numbers 2-4), several nouns have alternate forms for counting plural and collective plural (the latter being treated as a collective noun). For example, there are two ways to say leaves: lišce (collective) is used in "Leaves are falling from the trees", but listovi (counting) is used in "Those are some beautiful leaves".

Instances

In English, mass nouns and abstract nouns have plurals in less common instances. The phrase "by the waters of Babylon" is merely poetic, but the mass noun "water" takes a plural to signify the water drawn from different sources, with different trace minerals, as in the phrase "Different waters make for different beers." Similarly, the abstract noun "physics" is usually a vast unitary concept, but in its recent meaning of computer game subroutines, a plural sense is possible for different workings of physics, though without a change in inflection: "Throughout the history of the game series, the physics have improved."

See also Collective number Dual grammatical number English plural Grammatical number Plurale tantum Pluralis majestatis Romance