Formular Plural
Myong Killings
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.
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.
In many languages, there is also a dual number (used for indicating two objects). Some other grammatical numbers present in various languages include trial (for three objects) and paucal (for an imprecise but small number of objects). In languages with dual, trial, or paucal numbers, plural refers to numbers higher than those. However, numbers besides singular, plural, and (to a lesser extent) dual are extremely rare. Languages with numerical classifiers such as Chinese and Japanese lack any significant grammatical number at all, though they are likely to have plural personal pronouns.
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.
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).
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".
A given language may make plural forms of nouns by various types of inflection, including the addition of affixes, like the English -(e)s and -ies suffixes, or ablaut, as in the derivation of the plural geese from goose, or a combination of the two. Some languages may also form plurals by reduplication, but not as productive. It may be that some nouns are not marked for plural, like sheep and series in English. In languages which also have a case system, such as Latin and Russian, nouns can have not just one plural form but several, corresponding to the various cases. The inflection might affect multiple words, not just the noun; and the noun itself need not become plural as such, other parts of the expression indicate the plurality.
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 many languages, words other than nouns may take plural forms, these being used by way of grammatical agreement with plural nouns (or noun phrases). Such a word may in fact have a number of plural forms, to allow for simultaneous agreement within other categories such as case, person and gender, as well as marking of categories belonging to the word itself (such as tense of verbs, degree of comparison of adjectives, etc.)
Certain nouns do not form plurals. A large class of such nouns in many languages is that of uncountable nouns, representing mass or abstract concepts such as air, information, physics. However, many nouns of this type also have countable meanings or other contexts in which a plural can be used; for example water can take a plural when it means water from a particular source (different waters make for different beers) and in expressions like by the waters of Babylon.
There are also nouns found exclusively or almost exclusively in the plural, such as the English scissors. These are referred to with the term plurale tantum. Occasionally, a plural form can pull double duty as the singular form (or vice versa), as has happened with the word "data".
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 synesis, and also English plural Singulars as plural and plurals as singular.
I've been wondering about this for a while. It makes sense intuitively, but I feel this is probably partly due to having been conditioned to think about it this way throughout all our lives, because it's just the way most languages work.
But is there, formally, a reason why most languages treat singular nouns differently than their plural forms? Why do we add an -s at the end of the word in English, why does the ending change according to plurality in Italian, so on and so forth.
First, though you probably already know this, not all languages have different forms for singular and plural nouns. Some don't mark number at all, while others have more fine-grained distinctions, using different forms for "one thing" versus "two things" versus "more than two things", or "a small number" versus "a large number". Many languages also mark nouns for things that aren't number, such as gender and case.
But regardless, number marking is extremely common. Quite a lot of languages do it: one of Greenberg's "universals" is that no language marks gender unless it also marks number. And it happens across all sorts of different language families with no known genetic relationship to each other.
No natural language on earth, for example, actually has a separate form for "eight items" versus "not-eight items", or even for "two items" versus "not-two items" (that is, no language has a form meaning "either one or three-plus").
Many have a separate form for "exactly one", some have a separate form for "exactly two" (but only if they also have an "exactly one"), and a rare few have a separate form for "exactly three" (but only if there's also an "exactly one" and an "exactly two"). And these are all quantities that are quickly and instinctively recognized by infants from a very young age.
It is worth mentioning the fact that there seems to be some correlation between the numbers which languages may mark, and the numbers which human brains can treat differently. We can subitise small numbers, 1 to approx. 5, and so far as we've observed, languages are completely unable to mark for any number outside this range.
A single noun is fundamentally different from a plural one, because once you have more than one of something, ascribing an action or property becomes nontrivial. You have the issue of quantifiers. On one extreme you have the universal quantifier: "Friends don't let friends drink" implicitly means "All friends don't let friends drink". On the other end, there's the existential quantifier: "I have bananas at my house" implicitly means "There exists bananas at my house"; clearly it's not "all bananas are at my house. Then there are quantifiers in between, such as "most".
There were things his grandchildren, in turn, should know. Yet he hesitated. How do you tell your children they are progenies of the self-proclaimed inventor of Manhattan clam chowder? (The New York Times)
Oxford Dictionaries say "progeny" is a nountreated as singular or plural, but on Internet I found a number of occurrences of "progenies" and, hence, a doubt arose to my mind: is it entirely wrong pluralize "progeny"?
So it appears that when dealing with people, progeny is taken as a plural with some use as a singular, but when used in a genetic sense, it can occasionally be taken as a count noun that inflects regularly.
Dictionaries differ in the plural of progeny. Most list progeny as a plural, although Merriam-Webster does not. All list progenies as a plural, although Oxford and Random House use this form only for animals and plants, not children.
The functions of the gettext family described so far (and all thecatgets functions as well) have one problem in the real worldwhich have been neglected completely in all existing approaches. Whatis meant here is the handling of plural forms.
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