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Plural

In linguistics, the plural is a value of the grammatical category of number, denoting a quantity greater than one referent, in contrast to the singular which specifies exactly one.^[1] This category is typically expressed through inflectional morphology on nouns, pronouns, and sometimes verbs, allowing speakers to indicate multiplicity in reference.^[2] While the plural form often applies to two or more entities, its semantic interpretation can vary, sometimes extending to collective or abstract senses even for singular objects in certain contexts.^[2] Grammatical number systems, including the plural, differ widely across languages in complexity and marking strategies. Most languages distinguish only between singular and plural, with the plural commonly formed by adding suffixes such as -s in English (e.g., "cat" to "cats").^[3] However, some languages feature more elaborate systems, incorporating a dual form for exactly two referents, as seen in Inuktitut where nouns inflect distinctly for singular (titiraut, "pen"), dual (titirautiik), and plural (titirautit).^[3] In languages like Arabic or Yupik, number marking involves specific affixes that reflect these extended categories such as the dual, highlighting how number inflection adapts to cultural and cognitive needs for precise quantification.^[2] The plural's role extends beyond nouns to influence agreement in sentences, ensuring consistency in verbs, adjectives, and pronouns. For instance, in English, plural subjects trigger plural verb forms (e.g., "They run"), while irregular plurals like "children" or "geese" preserve historical patterns of formation.^[4] This agreement mechanism is crucial for syntactic coherence, and in agglutinative languages, number markers can accumulate on multiple elements within a phrase.^[3] Overall, the plural underscores the universality of quantity encoding in human language while showcasing typological diversity.

Grammatical Foundations

Definition and Role in Number Systems

In linguistics, the plural is defined as an inflected form or syntactic construction that denotes multiplicity, specifically referring to two or more entities, as opposed to a single one.^[5] This marking typically applies to nouns, pronouns, and sometimes adjectives or verbs through agreement, serving to indicate quantity in grammatical structures.^[6] Grammatical number constitutes a fundamental category in many languages, encompassing distinctions such as singular (denoting exactly one entity), plural (more than one), and less commonly, dual (exactly two) or trial (exactly three).^[7] These categories encode quantification over referents, influencing agreement patterns across syntactic elements like verbs and determiners, and are realized morphologically in inflectional languages or analytically in others.^[7] The plural plays a central role in this system by contrasting with singular to express non-unitary sets, while dual and trial provide finer-grained numerosity in select languages such as Classical Arabic (dual) or some Austronesian languages (trial).^[7] The origins of the plural trace back to Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the reconstructed ancestor of the Indo-European language family, where plural forms often evolved from earlier collective suffixes denoting groups or aggregates.^[8] In PIE, the neuter plural, for instance, utilized a collective suffix *-h₂, which manifested as -a in many daughter languages and shifted from indicating undivided wholes to distributive plurals over time.^[9] This evolution persisted in major Indo-European branches, such as Germanic and Romance, where plurals retained traces of these collective origins while adapting to mark countable multiplicity.^[9] In English, an Indo-European language, the plural is morphologically realized by adding -s or -es to nouns, as in the singular "cat" becoming the plural "cats" to denote multiple animals.^[10] By contrast, isolating languages like Mandarin Chinese lack obligatory morphological plurals on nouns, instead relying on quantifiers (e.g., "many" or "several") or context to convey multiplicity, with limited inflectional marking via suffixes like -men primarily on pronouns referring to humans.^[11] This typological variation highlights the plural's role as a flexible component of number systems across language families.^[12]

Distinction from Singular and Other Numbers

The singular grammatical number marks a single entity or referent, as exemplified by the English noun phrase "the dog," which refers to one individual dog. In contrast, the plural number indicates more than one, such as "the dogs," encompassing two or more entities. This distinction forms the core binary opposition in most languages' number systems, where the plural serves as the default for multiplicity beyond unity. Number agreement varies across languages: in English, it is obligatory, requiring verbs, adjectives, and determiners to match the noun's number, as in "the dog runs" versus "the dogs run." Conversely, in Japanese, number marking on nouns is optional and lacks obligatory agreement with other elements, allowing forms like inu ("dog") to contextually imply singular or plural without inflectional changes.^[13] Beyond the singular-plural binary, some languages distinguish additional numbers, such as the dual for exactly two referents. In Arabic, the dual is obligatorily marked on nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns; for instance, kitāb ("book," singular) becomes kitābāni ("two books," dual).^[14] Other systems include the trial for three referents or the paucal for a small but unspecified number greater than two. In Austronesian languages like Samoan, pronouns exhibit trial forms alongside singular, dual, and plural, such as matou (trial inclusive "we three"). These extended distinctions follow Greenberg's Universal 34, which posits that no language has a trial without a dual, and no dual without a plural.^[15] Such non-binary numbers are declining in modern usage across many languages. In Russian, the dual has been lost diachronically, with its former forms reanalyzed into countability distinctions between singular and plural. Similarly, in the Austronesian language Kala, the dual persists in pronouns but is eroding in nouns due to contact influences, reflecting a broader trend toward simplification in globalizing contexts.^[16] Functionally, the plural often conveys indefiniteness or generality, contrasting with the singular's potential for definiteness. In Bantu languages, noun classes pair singular and plural forms (e.g., class 1 singular with class 2 plural), where bare plural noun phrases typically imply indefinite or generic reference, as in Zulu abantu ("people," indefinite plural) versus definite singular umuntu ("the person").^[17] Bantu systems feature up to 20 classes, with singular-plural pairings enabling nuanced distinctions beyond mere count, such as augmentative or diminutive senses.^[18] Linguistically, number distinctions are marked through fusional or agglutinative typology. In fusional languages like Latin, a single ending fuses number with other categories, such as -i in puerī ("boys," plural nominative).^[19] Agglutinative languages like Turkish add discrete suffixes for number, as in köpek-ler ("dogs," where -ler solely marks plural), allowing clearer separation from case or other features.^[20] This typological contrast affects how number integrates with broader inflectional paradigms.^[19]

Plural Formation

Mechanisms in Nouns

Plural formation in nouns primarily occurs through morphological processes that alter the word's form to indicate multiplicity. These mechanisms vary across languages and include affixation, where a suffix is added to the singular stem; ablaut, involving internal vowel changes; suppletion, where the plural form is entirely unrelated to the singular; and reduplication, which repeats part or all of the stem.^[21]^[22] Affixation is the most common method, as seen in English where regular nouns typically add the suffix -s (e.g., cat/cats) and in German where many nouns, particularly weak masculines and feminines, add -en (e.g., der Student/die Studenten; die Frau/die Frauen), though umlaut occurs in some cases with other endings like -e (e.g., Apfel/Äpfel).^[21]^[23] Ablaut, or vowel gradation, marks plurality through stem-internal changes without affixation, exemplified in English by foot/feet and goose/geese, where a back rounded vowel shifts to a front unrounded one.^[21]^[24] Suppletion involves replacing the singular form with a phonologically distinct plural, as in English child/children, where the plural derives from an Old English weak ending -rum that evolved irregularly.^[21]^[24] Reduplication creates plural forms by copying a portion of the stem, often at the onset, and is prominent in Salishan languages such as St'át'imcets (Lillooet), where initial consonant reduplication marks plurality (e.g., sqʷəqʷyíc 'rabbits' from sqʷəyíc 'rabbit').^[25] Irregular plurals frequently arise from historical sound changes that disrupted regular patterns, leading to exceptions preserved through analogy or lexical retention.^[24] In Latin, sound shifts like vowel lengthening affected fourth-declension nouns, resulting in forms such as domus (singular) / domūs (plural nominative), which upon borrowing into English retain the Latin plural in specialized contexts (e.g., academic or architectural usage: domus / domūs).^[26]^[27] Zero plurals, where the singular and plural forms are identical without morphological marking, occur in English for certain animal names like sheep and deer, relying on context for interpretation.^[21] This pattern is widespread in classifier languages such as Mandarin Chinese, which lacks obligatory plural inflection on nouns and instead uses numeral classifiers or quantifiers (e.g., yī gè rén 'one person' vs. duō gè rén 'many people') to convey number, treating bare nouns as number-neutral.^[28] Cross-linguistically, gender influences plural formation in Romance languages, where masculine and feminine nouns often share the same plural suffix despite differing singular endings. In French, for instance, both genders typically add -s (e.g., masculine chat/chats 'cat/cats'; feminine chatte/chattes 'female cat/female cats'), though pronunciation varies by phonological context, with the suffix silent in isolation but realized before vowels.^[29]^[30]

Forms in Verbs, Adjectives, and Pronouns

In many languages, verbs exhibit number agreement with their subjects through inflectional morphology, ensuring concord in person and number. For instance, in English, singular subjects pair with singular verb forms, as in "he runs," while plural subjects require plural forms, such as "they run."^[31] This agreement highlights the unmarked nature of singular count nouns compared to marked plural forms, influencing processing and error patterns in production.^[32] In pro-drop languages like Spanish, where subject pronouns can be omitted due to rich verbal inflection, number agreement remains explicit on the verb. For example, the third-person plural form "corren" (they run) distinguishes plurality without a overt pronoun, as the affixal morphology encodes both person and number sufficiently for recovery.^[33] This contrasts with non-pro-drop languages like English, where poorer agreement morphology necessitates overt subjects to convey number clearly.^[33] Adjectives in inflectional languages often inflect for number to agree with the nouns they modify, a process absent in analytic languages like English where adjectives remain invariant. In Italian, a Romance language with synthetic features, adjectives adjust endings for both gender and number; for example, the masculine singular "grande" (big) becomes "grandi" in the masculine plural to agree with nouns like "case grandi" (big houses).^[34] This concord ensures syntactic harmony within noun phrases, with adjectives typically following the noun but still marking plurality explicitly.^[34] Pronouns frequently encode plurality through distinct forms that may carry additional semantic nuances beyond mere count. In many Austronesian languages, first-person plural pronouns distinguish inclusive and exclusive variants: the inclusive form, such as Chamorro "ta" (you and I, plus others), includes the addressee, while the exclusive "in" (I and others, excluding you) does not.^[35] This clusivity distinction is a hallmark of the family, appearing in nearly all Austronesian languages surveyed.^[35] Certain plural pronoun uses serve honorific or stylistic purposes, as seen in the majestic plural or royal "we," where a singular referent employs a plural form to convey authority or grandeur. Historically employed by monarchs and deities, this pluralis majestatis appears in languages like Latin and English literary traditions, though it lacks clear attestation in Biblical Hebrew pronouns or verbs.^[36] In modern English dialects, the second-person plural "you" has developed regional variants to address the absence of a dedicated form; Southern American English uses "y'all" (a contraction of "you all") specifically for plural reference, as in "y'all come back now," distinguishing it from singular "you."^[37] In polysynthetic languages such as Inuktitut, an Eskimo-Aleut language, number marking extends beyond nouns and verbs to other elements, including certain particles and adverbial affixes incorporated into complex words. Inuktitut features a three-way number system (singular, dual, plural) that applies to verbal agreement and can influence incorporated modifiers functioning adverbially, allowing holistic expression of plurality within single words.^[38] For example, verbal complexes may include affixes denoting plural actions or locations that behave like adverbial particles, reflecting the language's agglutinative nature where plurality permeates the entire predicate.^[39]

Special Cases and Exceptions

Non-Countable and Mass Nouns

Mass nouns, also known as uncountable or non-count nouns, denote substances, materials, collectives, or abstract concepts that are conceptualized as undifferentiated wholes without discrete units, thereby lacking inherent plurality. In English, examples include "water," referring to a liquid substance, and "information," an abstract entity that cannot be enumerated individually. These nouns exhibit cumulative reference, where the combination of two portions yields a larger portion of the same kind, and they are syntactically singular, incompatible with cardinal numbers or indefinite articles like "a" or "an."^[40] When plurality must be expressed for mass nouns in English, speakers rely on indirect strategies rather than direct morphological pluralization. Partitive constructions quantify portions via containers or measures, such as "bottles of water" or "items of information," allowing reference to multiple discrete amounts. Alternatively, zero-derived plurals can indicate varieties or types, as in "wines" for different kinds of wine, while lexical shifts enable plurals for servings, like "beers" denoting individual drinks. These methods preserve the mass semantics while accommodating contexts requiring multiplicity.^[41] Cross-linguistic variation reveals greater flexibility in pluralizing mass nouns in some languages compared to English's stricter uncountability. In Russian, for example, the mass noun "voda" (water) can form the plural "vody" to refer to types or portions, such as different mineral waters, a usage unavailable for equivalents like "pivo" (beer). This parametric difference underscores how number morphology on mass nouns, though uncommon, occurs in various languages to encode subtypes or distributed quantities.^[42]^[43] Historical semantic shifts illustrate how former countable plurals can become mass nouns in English. The term "data," derived from the Latin plural "data" (neuter plural of "datum," meaning "things given"), was initially treated as plural in scientific English but has largely evolved into a singular mass noun in contemporary usage, reflecting a reconceptualization as an undifferentiated aggregate.^[44]

Invariant or Defective Forms

In linguistics, invariant nouns are those that do not inflect for number, maintaining the same form regardless of whether they refer to a single entity or multiple ones.^[45] These include collectives like English "cattle," which functions as a mass noun without singular or plural distinction, derived from Old Northern French "catel" meaning movable property and entering English as an uncountable term for livestock.^[46] Similarly, "sheep" and "deer" remain unchanged in both singular and plural contexts, reflecting historical patterns where certain animal nouns avoided morphological marking for plurality. Defective nouns exhibit partial paradigms, inflecting for number only in specific contexts. Proper names, for instance, typically lack plural forms but can form them when referring to families or groups, as in "the Smiths" for multiple members of the Smith family, following standard English pluralization rules by adding "-s" to names not ending in sibilants.^[47] Collectives like "people" (plural of "person") or "police" often resist further pluralization, treating the group as a unitary concept despite denoting multiplicity.^[45] A subset of invariant forms includes pluralia tantum, nouns that occur exclusively in the plural and lack a singular counterpart, such as "scissors," "trousers," and "glasses." These often arise etymologically from compound structures or paired objects; for example, "scissors" derives from Latin caesorium (a cutting instrument), treated as plural due to its two blades functioning as a set, while "trousers" evolved from Old French trebus (a garment with two legs), entering English in the 16th century as a plural form emphasizing duality.^[45] Conversely, singularia tantum are nouns restricted to singular form, including abstracts like "news," "furniture," and "information," which denote uncountable concepts or masses and do not pluralize; "news," for instance, stems from Middle English neves (plural of Latin nova, new things) but standardized as a singular mass noun by the 17th century.^[48] Cross-linguistically, invariant forms vary. Japanese nouns generally lack obligatory number marking, with forms like neko (cat/cats) remaining unchanged and plurality conveyed contextually via classifiers or quantifiers such as hon (counter for long objects) in san-hon no enpitsu (three pencils).^[49] In Slavic languages, singularia tantum predominate among abstract nouns, as in Russian udivlenie (surprise) or ispug (fright), which occur only in singular due to their non-discrete, qualitative semantics, contrasting with count nouns that fully inflect.^[50]

Semantic and Syntactic Usage

Indicating Multiplicity and Collectivity

Plural forms in language primarily serve to indicate multiplicity, denoting more than one entity, and collectivity, referring to a group treated as a unified whole. Semantically, plural marking distinguishes between distributive readings, where a predicate applies to each member of the set individually, and collective readings, where it applies to the entire group. For instance, in the sentence "The children are asleep," a distributive interpretation requires that each child is asleep separately, whereas "The children gathered in the yard" conveys a collective action of the group as a unit. This distinction arises from the semantics of plurality, where plural noun phrases can sum individuals into a group but predicates may distribute over atoms or apply holistically.^[51] Syntactically, plural forms trigger agreement across elements in a sentence, ensuring concord in number features. In English, a plural subject like "the cats" requires a plural verb form, as in "The cats run," where the verb conjugates to match the plural number of the subject noun phrase. This agreement extends to other categories, such as adjectives and pronouns, maintaining syntactic harmony. Additionally, plurals facilitate coordination, allowing conjoined noun phrases like "cats and dogs" to form plural entities that agree collectively with predicates, e.g., "Cats and dogs play together." Quantification also interacts with plurals, where expressions like "many cats" or "three dogs" license plural marking to denote sets of multiple items, influencing the interpretation of numerical or indefinite quantifiers. Generic plurals represent a distinct semantic use, where bare plural noun phrases refer to kinds, species, or classes rather than specific individuals, often conveying general properties or habits. For example, "Cats are mammals" uses the plural "cats" to generalize about the feline species as a whole, without implying a particular group of cats. This contrasts with specific plurals, such as "The cats in the yard are mammals," which refer to a definite set of individuals. Generic interpretations arise in subject position and involve a kind-referring semantics, distinct from episodic or referential uses of plurals. Edge cases illustrate further nuances in plural usage. Honorific contexts may employ plural forms to denote respect for a single entity, as in English historical usage "His Majesties" for a king, triggering plural agreement despite singular reference. Similarly, indefinite singular constructions like "one of the boys" can treat the embedded plural "the boys" as controlling agreement in relative clauses, e.g., "One of the boys who are late will apologize," where "who are" agrees with the plural antecedent "boys." These cases highlight how plurality can override strict numerical singularity for pragmatic or syntactic reasons.

Variations Across Languages

Plural marking exhibits significant typological variation across language families, with some requiring obligatory expression of plurality for count nouns while others treat it as optional or context-dependent. In Indo-European languages such as English, plural marking is generally obligatory for countable nouns in non-generic contexts, ensuring that multiplicity is explicitly indicated through suffixes or other morphological changes.^[52] In contrast, many Sino-Tibetan languages, including Mandarin Chinese, feature optional plural marking, where suffixes like -men (们) appear primarily with human or animate referents and can be omitted when plurality is inferable from context.^[53] This optionality aligns with the isolating morphological profile common in the family, prioritizing pragmatic inference over obligatory inflection. Certain language families introduce semantic distinctions in pluralization based on animacy hierarchies, further diversifying how plurality is encoded. Algonquian languages, for instance, classify nouns into animate and inanimate categories, with plural suffixes differing accordingly: animate plurals often end in -ag or -ak (e.g., Ojibwe waabizheshiwaag 'martens'), while inanimate plurals use -an or -ag (e.g., Ojibwe inaakanaawaan 'dishes').^[54] This animate/inanimate split influences not only plural forms but also verb agreement and possession, reflecting a worldview where animacy extends beyond biological life to culturally significant entities.^[55] In agglutinative languages, plural markers integrate seamlessly into stacked suffix sequences, allowing complex expressions of number alongside other grammatical categories. Turkish exemplifies this through its vowel-harmonic plural suffix -ler or -lar, which attaches to noun roots before additional case or locative endings; for example, ev (house) becomes evler (houses) and evlerde (in the houses), demonstrating how plurality is layered without altering the root.^[56] This agglutinative strategy enables concise yet information-rich forms, characteristic of Turkic and Uralic languages where suffixes accumulate in a fixed order to convey multiple relations.^[57] Socio-cultural factors also shape plural usage, particularly in honorific systems where plurality signals respect or social distance. In Korean, plural pronouns for the first person, such as jeohui-deul (we, humble), incorporate honorific elements akin to singular forms, extending deference to groups and aligning with the language's hierarchical speech levels.^[58] Conversely, some languages employ plural avoidance in taboo contexts to mitigate offense or supernatural risks; for example, in certain African languages like Kambaata, speakers select alternate lexical forms over standard plurals when referring to in-laws or prohibited topics, preserving social harmony through circumlocution.^[59] Contemporary linguistic evolution, driven by contact and globalization, often results in simplified plural systems, especially in creoles and pidgins. These contact varieties typically reduce obligatory marking to optional or invariant forms, as seen in Nigerian Pidgin English where the English-derived -s plural appears inconsistently, relying instead on quantifiers or context for multiplicity (e.g., di boy dem 'the boys').^[60] Globalization amplifies this trend by promoting invariant or simplified plurals in global Englishes and hybrid varieties, where exposure to dominant languages erodes traditional inflections in favor of pragmatic efficiency, particularly in urban multilingual settings.^[61]

Formal and Computational Treatment

Part-of-Speech Tagging

In part-of-speech (POS) tagging, grammatical number for nouns is typically distinguished through specific tags or morphological features to indicate singular versus plural forms. The Penn Treebank tagset, a widely used scheme for English, employs NN for singular or mass nouns (e.g., "car" or "data" in singular contexts) and NNS for plural nouns (e.g., "cars").^[62] Similarly, for verbs, tags like VB (base form) contrast with VBP (present tense, non-3rd person singular), reflecting number agreement.^[62] This scheme enables taggers to capture plurality as an inherent property of the word's inflection.^[63] The Universal Dependencies (UD) framework extends this to cross-lingual settings by using a universal POS tagset where nouns are uniformly tagged as NOUN, with an additional Number feature to specify Sing (singular) or Plur (plural), such as Number=Plur for "cars."^[64] This feature-based approach facilitates consistent annotation across over 100 languages, supporting multilingual models that propagate plural information via dependencies.^[65] UD datasets, like UD English-EWT, include explicit plural markings, aiding in training taggers for number-sensitive tasks.^[66] Challenges in POS tagging for plural forms arise primarily from ambiguity, where words like "data" can function as singular (NN, e.g., "the data is reliable") or plural (NNS, e.g., "the data are analyzed") based on syntactic agreement and context.^[63] Resolving such cases requires contextual disambiguation, as rule-based systems struggle with exceptions while machine learning models depend on sufficient training data to learn patterns.^[67] In low-resource languages, error rates for plural tagging in UD can exceed 10-15% higher than in high-resource ones like English (where accuracies reach 95-97%), due to limited annotated data and morphological complexity.^[68] Approaches to POS tagging have evolved from rule-based methods, which apply hand-crafted heuristics for plural inflections, to probabilistic models like Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) that estimate tag sequences based on emission and transition probabilities.^[67] Modern systems leverage transformer-based architectures, such as BERT fine-tuned for POS, achieving state-of-the-art accuracies by incorporating bidirectional context for number resolution.^[69] These neural methods outperform earlier HMMs on plural disambiguation, particularly in UD benchmarks.^[70] Historically, POS tagging began with rule-based systems in the 1970s, such as early parsers using affix rules for plural detection in English.^[67] By the 1990s, stochastic approaches like HMMs dominated, as seen in the Brill tagger's transformation rules for error correction.^[67] Post-2010, the shift to neural models, including recurrent and transformer networks, addressed limitations in handling rare plural forms and cross-lingual transfer, with UD enabling scalable annotation since 2014.^[65]

Applications in Linguistics and NLP

In linguistics, finite-state transducers (FSTs) are widely employed for morphological analysis, enabling the generation and parsing of plural forms by modeling inflectional rules as bidirectional mappings between surface forms and underlying morphemes. For instance, FSTs can systematically produce plural variants such as English "cat" to "cats" or more complex cases in agglutinative languages like Turkish, where suffixes indicate number alongside other features. This approach, foundational in computational morphology, facilitates efficient processing of large lexicons and supports applications in dictionary building and language documentation.^[71]^[72] Sociolinguistic research utilizes plural forms to examine dialectal variations, revealing how social factors influence morphological marking across communities. Studies on regional dialects, such as those in American English, highlight differences in plural realization, like the use of zero plurals for mass nouns in certain Southern varieties, which reflect identity and socioeconomic patterns. These investigations employ plural markers as indicators of language shift and variation, aiding in the preservation of endangered dialects.^[73]^[74] In natural language processing (NLP), handling plural mismatches is critical for machine translation systems, particularly between languages with differing number agreement rules, such as English and French. Neural machine translation models often struggle with morphological mismatches, leading to errors in gender-number concord, as seen in translations where English singular "the child" becomes French plural "les enfants" inappropriately due to context ambiguity. Techniques like subword regularization and attention mechanisms mitigate these issues, improving accuracy by up to 5-10% on benchmarks involving number-sensitive pairs.^[75]^[76] Text generation in chatbots and language models requires maintaining plural consistency to ensure grammatical coherence across responses. Large language models, such as those underlying GPT variants, are evaluated for factual and syntactic consistency, including number agreement, where inconsistencies in plural usage can degrade user trust and output quality. Prompt engineering and fine-tuning strategies enforce plural harmony, as demonstrated in consistency analyses showing reduced error rates in multi-turn dialogues.^[77]^[78] Advanced NLP tasks like semantic role labeling (SRL) incorporate plural distinctions to differentiate collective versus distributive interpretations in predicate-argument structures, as annotated in resources like PropBank. In PropBank, plural noun phrases may receive roles such as ARG1 (agent-like) where collectivity implies group action, versus distributive readings for individual instances, enhancing inference in event understanding. This granularity supports downstream applications in question answering and summarization by resolving ambiguities in multi-entity scenarios.^[79]^[80] Multilingual models like multilingual BERT (mBERT) demonstrate robust handling of plurals across languages, achieving above-chance performance in number agreement tasks through pretraining on diverse corpora. Evaluations show mBERT distinguishing singular and plural forms in zero-shot settings for over 100 languages, though performance varies by morphological richness, with agglutinative languages benefiting from shared subword representations. This capability enables cross-lingual transfer for plural-sensitive tasks without language-specific annotations.^[81]^[82] In emerging low-resource NLP, transfer learning addresses plural morphology challenges by leveraging high-resource models to infer inflections in under-resourced languages. Cross-lingual morphological taggers, trained on related languages, achieve up to 80% accuracy in plural tagging for languages like those in the Universal Dependencies treebanks, using techniques such as multilingual embeddings to bridge data gaps. This approach has been pivotal for revitalizing minority languages with sparse plural paradigms.^[83]^[84] Ethical considerations in plural handling arise from biases in NLP systems, particularly where plural assumptions reinforce gender stereotypes in non-binary or gender-neutral contexts. For example, models trained on gendered corpora may default to binary plural forms, marginalizing neutral language and perpetuating exclusion in translation or generation tasks. Mitigation strategies, including debiasing datasets and inclusive prompting, are essential to promote equitable representations across diverse identities.^[85]^[86]

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[PDF] Going Radical in Salish - Cascadilla Proceedings Project
As far as I can see, the same is true of other Salish languages. In St'át'imcets, for example, the C1C2- reduplication operation which forms plurals is normally ...
[24]
Latin Nouns verb 'domus' conjugated - Verbix verb conjugator
Latin Nouns verb 'domus' conjugated ; Nominative · domus · domūs ; Genitive · domūs · domuum; domōrum ; Dative · domuī · domibus ; Accusative · domum · domūs; domōs ...Missing: linguistics | Show results with:linguistics
[25]
Latin : domus, dom-us f. - louis ha
FOURTH DECLENSION NOUNS. Latin : domus, dom-us f. English : house/home. SINGULAR, PLURAL. NOM. domus, domus. GEN. domus, domuum. DAT. domui, domibus.
[26]
Acquisition of plurality in a language without plurality * | Request PDF
Mandarin Chinese has no marking for either plurality or definiteness on bare nominals, but has a portmanteau morpheme -men which encodes both plurality and ...<|separator|>
[27]
The Romance noun: a comparative-historical study of plural formation
Despite its fundamental place in Romance morphology, number-marking has received rather little detailed attention from a comparative-historical perspective.
[28]
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287152045_Acquisition_of_plurality_in_a_language_without_plurality
[29]
Subject/Verb Agreement - Purdue OWL
11. Expressions such as with, together with, including, accompanied by, in addition to, or as well do not change the number of the subject.
[30]
The Marked Effect of Number on Subject–Verb Agreement
The results provide evidence that singular count nouns are unmarked or lack a grammatical feature for number while plural count nouns are marked or possess a ...Missing: linguistics | Show results with:linguistics
[31]
Reversing the Approach to Null Subjects: A Perspective ... - Frontiers
Indeed, pro-drop languages that have agreement morphology—such as Spanish or Italian—tend to have “rich” inflectional systems (with different forms for ...
[32]
Adjectives in Italian: Form and Agreement - ThoughtCo
Mar 17, 2017 · An adjective is a word that qualifies a noun; for example, a good boy. In Italian an adjective agrees in gender and number with the noun it modifies.
[33]
Chapter Inclusive/Exclusive Distinction in Independent Pronouns
An inclusive pronoun necessarily includes reference to the addressee. For example, the Mandarin inclusive pronoun zámen means 'we, I and you'; others can ...
[34]
None
### Summary of Pluralis Majestatis or Royal We in Linguistics
[35]
Y'all, we need to talk about 'y'all' - NPR
Jul 16, 2025 · "Y'all" has gone from being a Southernism to become America's favorite way to use the second person plural, according to linguists.
[36]
Inflectional Morphology – ENGL6360 Descriptive Linguistics for ...
The three-way distinction between singular, dual, and plural in Inuktitut applies not only to nouns but also to verbs that agree with their noun subjects.
[37]
[PDF] Polysynthetic word-internal adjectives and verb-like adjectives in Inuit
In the Nunavik dialect, as in the Inuit language in general, there are four basic types of words: nouns, verbs, localizers/demonstratives, and small words. *.
[38]
The Logic of Mass Expressions - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Mar 8, 2013 · This property of mass nouns is called cumulative reference. Plural count nouns also have the same property. Let Ns be a plural count noun. If ...
[39]
What is a Mass Noun? (With Examples) | Grammarly
Mar 24, 2022 · Mass nouns, also known as “uncountable nouns” or “noncount nouns,” are nouns representing something that cannot be counted. A mass noun ...Missing: linguistics | Show results with:linguistics
[40]
[PDF] Mass-to-Count Shifts and Number Morphology
Crucially, while pivo 'beer' entirely lacks an acceptable plural form. (*piva 'beers'), voda 'water' can be pluralized (vody 'waters'). ... plural mass nouns (3) ...
[41]
[PDF] 1 Reference to kinds and to other generic expressions in Spanish
First, it appears that cross-linguistically, number morphology on mass nouns is not that rare (cf. Corbett 2000). In particular, it has been shown that in Greek ...
[42]
Data are or data is? | Language - The Guardian
Jul 16, 2010 · In Latin, data is the plural of datum and, historically and in specialized scientific fields , it is also treated as a plural in English ...
[43]
Pluralia tantum nouns and the theory of features: a typology of ...
Dec 5, 2018 · Pluralia tantum is similarly a label for nouns which have only a plural when, in some sense, this is not expected. English binoculars has no ...
[44]
What's the singular form of 'cattle'? - Motivated Grammar
Jul 13, 2010 · Unfortunately, cattle entered the English language strictly as a mass noun, much like its sibling capital**. (Mass nouns, if you aren't ...Missing: invariant | Show results with:invariant
[45]
Plural and Possessive Names: A Guide - Merriam-Webster
Names are proper nouns, which become plurals the same way that other nouns do: add the letter -s for most names (“the Johnsons,” “the Websters”) or add -es ...
[46]
Grammatical Gender
Then there are the singularia and pluralia tantum: A singulare tantum is a noun that has no plural. English has many such singularia tantum, such as dust, ...
[47]
Numeral classifiers in Japanese - Oxford Academic
Like some other languages that also utilize numeral classifiers, common nouns in Japanese lack an obligatory number distinction.
[48]
[PDF] CORPUS-BASED PROFILES OF RUSSIAN NOUNS
Dec 8, 2015 · The singular-oriented nouns (singularia tantum and those that occur in plural only occasionally, e. g. udivlenie ʽsurpriseʼ, ispug ʽfrightʼ ...<|control11|><|separator|>
[49]
[PDF] plurality - Semantics Archive
Central problems in the study of plurality include accounting for the distribution of collective, distributive, and possibly also intermediate interpretations; ...
[50]
[PDF] The Syntax of Semantic Agreement in British English - Peter W. Smith
Both singular and plural agreement are able to appear with these collective nouns, which are shown to be morphologically singular but semantically plural.
[51]
[PDF] A new approach to plurals-of-politeness and their number agreement
Aug 2, 2024 · However, in some languages, PoPs can trigger singular agreement on some targets, while simultaneously triggering plural agreement on others.
[52]
[PDF] Nominal plurality in languages of the Greater Hindukush - DiVA portal
This is an indication that plural marking is obligatory in English. In many other languages, it is optional, meaning that where plurality is normally marked, it ...
[53]
https://oxfordre.com/linguistics/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-9780199384655-e-530
[54]
[PDF] Introduction to Nouns: Gender
Nouns can be either singular or plural. Plural nouns take a plural suffix, which ends in g for animate nouns, and n for inanimate nouns. Here are a few examples ...
[55]
[PDF] Inanimate nouns as subjects in Mi'gmaq
Algonquian languages split nouns into two grammatical classes: animate and inanimate. There is a semantic basis for this class: living entities are ...
[56]
The Production of Noun Suffixes by Turkish-Speaking Children with ...
This single-dimension quality of Turkish is conveyed through an agglutinating morphology, in which suffixes appear in a fixed sequence following and attached ...
[57]
[PDF] MORPHOLOGY - İTÜ
In agglutinative languages such as. Turkish, new words can be derived by adding derivational and inflectional suffixes to a root word in a certain order. Page ...
[58]
Korean Language Course Plurals (Speak Like Natives)
1st person plural pronouns with honorifics are quite similar to singular pronouns. it also uses '저' in them. It doesn't have a different subject pronoun so ...
[59]
2.2 Language and offence – Essentials of Linguistics, 2nd edition
Likewise, the strategies for taboo avoidance are varied. In Kambaata, many words have alternate forms that would be used to avoid matching an in-law's name.
[60]
[PDF] PLURAL MARKING PAITERNS IN NIGERIAN PIDGIN ENGLISH Sali ...
This paper examines the pluralization system of Nigerian Pidgin English. (NPE). Extrapolating from proposals in the literature on English-based creoles.
[61]
https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/jpcl.19.1.06sie
[62]
[PDF] Penn Treebank POS Tag Set
NN Noun, singular or mass machine computer air wind. 13. NNS Noun plural machines computers. 14. NNP Proper Noun, Singular. Philadelphia Delaware Eagles. 15 ...
[63]
[PDF] Part-of-Speech Tagging Guidelines for the Penn Treebank Project ...
If a noun is semantically plural or collective, but triggers singular agreement, it should be tagged as singular. EXAMPLES: The group/NN has/*have disbanded.
[64]
Number : number - Universal Dependencies
A singular noun denotes one person, animal or thing. Examples. [en] car. Plur : plural number. A plural noun denotes several persons, animals or things.Missing: annotation scheme
[65]
[PDF] Universal Dependencies - Stanford NLP Group
Jul 31, 2021 · For example, the Czech possessive pronoun náš 'our' is tagged Number[psor]=Plur to indicate that the possessor's number is plural. At the ...
[66]
Universal Dependencies
Universal Dependencies (UD) is a framework for consistent annotation of grammar (parts of speech, morphological features, and syntactic dependencies) across ...Short introduction to UD · Dependency Relations · UD English PUD · UD Guidelines
[67]
[PDF] Part-of-Speech Tagging - Stanford University
Part-of-speech tagging is assigning parts of speech to words, revealing information about a word and its neighbors, and is key to parsing.
[68]
[PDF] A Benchmark Study and Error Analysis of POS Tagging for ...
Sep 8, 2025 · Many low-resource languages, especially Cre- oles, diverge typologically from the languages on which these multilingual models have been trained.
[69]
Part-of-Speech Tagging with Rule-Based Data Preprocessing and ...
This paper proposes a novel approach for POS tagging using rule-based preprocessing to prune tags, then a Transformer model to predict masked tags.
[70]
Part of speech tagging: a systematic review of deep learning and ...
Jan 24, 2022 · This article first clarifies the concept of part of speech POS tagging. It then provides the broad categorization based on the famous ML and DL techniques.Missing: 1970s | Show results with:1970s
[71]
2.3 Morphological Analysis with Finite State Transducers
It is possible to write finite state transducers that map the surface form of a word to a description of the morphemes that constitute that word or vice versa.
[72]
Finite State Transducer (FSTs) in NLP - GeeksforGeeks
Oct 31, 2025 · A Finite State Transducer (FST) is an extension of a Finite State Automaton (FSA) that maps input sequences to output sequences.
[73]
[PDF] Lexical Plurals - Georgetown University
In this scenario, the language expresses plurality by means of its vocabulary, not of its grammar. A clarification is needed to prevent a possible ...
[74]
Regional and Sociolinguistic Variation of Personal Pronouns in ...
Sep 1, 2023 · This study examines the regional and sociolinguistic variation in the paradigms of personal pronouns, independent and dependent, in Najdi ...
[75]
Morphological mismatches in machine translation - ResearchGate
Aug 7, 2025 · This paper addresses one of the least studied, although very important, problems of machine translation—the problem of morphological mismatches ...
[76]
(PDF) Syntactic mismatches in machine translation - ResearchGate
Aug 7, 2025 · In English, typical instances of NEG are: not, far from,without,less than; in French,. one of the instances of NEG is peu 'little'. This lexical ...
[77]
[PDF] Consistency Analysis of ChatGPT - ACL Anthology
Dec 6, 2023 · The consistency of language models has been an important topic in natural language process- ing (NLP) but conducted under various definitions.
[78]
(PDF) Language Model Evaluation in Open-ended Text Generation
Aug 8, 2021 · In this work, we study different evaluation metrics that have been proposed to evaluate quality, diversity and consistency of machine-generated ...
[79]
[PDF] The Proposition Bank: An Annotated Corpus of Semantic Roles
The Proposition Bank adds semantic role labels to the Penn Treebank, focusing on verb argument structure and providing a complete corpus annotated with ...Missing: plural | Show results with:plural
[80]
[PDF] Dependency-based Semantic Role Labeling of PropBank
Our system is the first dependency-based semantic role labeler for PropBank that rivals constituent-based systems in terms of performance. 1 Introduction.Missing: plural collective distributive
[81]
[PDF] This is a BERT. Now there are several of them. Can they generalize ...
We find that BERT is able to distinguish plural and singular forms to perform number agree- ment significantly above chance in all languages. However, many BERT ...
[82]
[PDF] Cross-Linguistic Syntactic Difference in Multilingual BERT
Dec 7, 2022 · Multilingual BERT (mBERT) has demon- strated considerable cross-lingual syntactic ability, whereby it enables effective zero-shot.
[83]
[PDF] Cross-Lingual Morphological Tagging for Low-Resource Languages
We propose models suitable for training morphological taggers with rich tagsets for low-resource languages without using direct supervision.Missing: plural | Show results with:plural
[84]
[PDF] Neural Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Low-Resource Morphology
In this work, we focus particularly on low- resource languages. In order to make up for missing training data, we experiment with transfer learning to leverage ...<|separator|>
[85]
Gender Bias in Machine Translation - MIT Press Direct
Aug 18, 2021 · As a relatively new field of inquiry, studies of gender bias in MT still lack cohesion. This advocates for a unified framework to ease future research.
[86]
[PDF] A Survey on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing
Dec 28, 2021 · Further, we define gender bias and sexism in general and in NLP, in particular, incorporating a discussion of their ethical considerations (§4).