Реферат Nouns

d the generic "you", found in many languages, or, in English, when using the singular "they" for gender-neutrality.

Collective nouns

A collective noun is a word that designates a group of objects or beings regarded as a whole, such as "flock", "Team", or "corporation". Although many languages ​​treat collective nouns as singular, in others they may be interpreted as plural. In British English, phrases such as the committee are meeting are common (The so-called agreement in sensu "in meaning", that is, with the meaning of a noun, rather than with its form). The use of this type of construction varies with dialect and level of formality.

В  Types of number Singular versus plural

In most languages ​​with grammatical number, nouns, and sometimes other parts of speech, have two forms, the singular, for one instance of a concept, and the plural, for more than one instance. Usually, the singular is the unmarked form of a word, and the plural is obtained by inflecting the singular. This is the case in English: car/cars, box/boxes, man/men. There may be exceptional nouns whose plural is identical to the singular: one fish/two fish.

Collective versus singulative

Some languages ​​differentiate between a basic form, the collective, which is indifferent in respect to number, and a more complicated derived form for single entities, the singulative, for example Japanese and some Brythonic languages. A rough example in English is "snowflake", which may be considered a singulative form of "snow" (although English has no productive process of forming singulative nouns, and no singulative modifiers). In other languages, singulatives can be productively formed from collective nouns; eg Standard Arabic حجر ḥajar "stone" → حجرة ḥajarā "(individual) stone ", بقر baqar" cattle "→ بقرة baqarā "(single) cow"

Dual number

The distinction between a "singular" number (one) and a "plural" number (more than one) found in English is not the only possible classification. Another one is "singular" (one), "Dual" (two) and "plural" (more than two). Dual number existed in Proto-Indo-European, persisted in many of the now extinct ancient Indo-European languages that descended from it-Sanskrit, Ancient Greek and Gothic for example-and can still be found in a few modern Indo-European languages ​​such as Icelandic and Slovene language. Many more modern Indo-European languages ​​show residual traces of the dual, as in the English distinctions both versus all and better versus best.

Many Semitic languages ​​also have dual number.

Trial number

The trial number is a grammatical number referring to 'three items ', in contrast to' singular '(one item),' dual '(two items), and' plural ' (Four or more items). Tolomako, Lihir and Tok Pisin (though only in its pronouns) have trial number.

There is a hierarchy between number categories: No language distinguishes a trial unless having a dual, and no language has dual without a plural (Greenberg 1972).

Some languages, such as Latvian, have a nullar form, used for nouns that refer to zero items. Other languages ​​use either the singular or the plural form for zero. English, along with the other Germanic languages ​​and most Romance languages, uses the plural. French normally uses the singular, instead.

Distributive plural

Distributive plural number, for many instances viewed as independent individuals (e.g. in Navajo).

In most languages, the singular is formally unmarked, whereas the plural is marked in some way. Other languages, most notably the Bantu languages, mark both the singular and the plural, for instance Swahili (See example above). The third logical possibility, rarely found in languages, is unmarked plural contrasting with marked singular.

Elements marking number may appear on nouns and pronouns in dependent-marking languages ​​or on verbs and adjectives in head-marking languages.

English
(Dependent-marking)

Western Apache
(Head-marking)

Paul is teaching the cowboy.

Paul idilohГ­ yiЕ‚ch'Г­gГі'aah.

Paul is teaching the cowboy s .

Paul idilohГ­ yiЕ‚ch'Г­ da gГі'aah.

In the English sentence above, the plural suffix -s is added to the noun cowboy . In the Western Apache, a head-marking language, equivalent, a plural prefix da- is added to the verb yiЕ‚ch'Г­gГі'aah "He is teaching him", resulting in yiЕ‚ch'Г­dagГі'aa...