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In linguistics, grammatical number refers to a form of expressing quantity through inflection or grammatical agreement. For example, in the English sentences below: That fresh apple is on the table. Those fresh apples are on the table. The number of apples is marked on the noun itself — "apple", singular number (one item) vs. "apples", plural number (more than one item) — , as well as on the demonstrative pronoun, "that/those", and on the verb, "is/are". Furthermore, every noun in English is either singular or plural (some rare nouns, such as "fish", can be both), and every modifier of a noun must have a number which is compatible with that of the noun: "this car" and "those cars" are correct, while " Not all languages have number as a grammatical category. In those that do not, quantity must be expressed either directly, with numerals, or indirectly, through optional indefinite pronouns or similar pro-forms. However, many of these languages compensate for the lack of grammatical number with an extensive system of measure words. The word number is also used in linguistics to describe the distinction between certain grammatical aspects that indicate the number of times an event occurs, such as the semelfactive aspect, the iterative aspect, etc. For that use of the term, see Grammatical aspect. Semantic vs. grammatical number All languages are able to specify the quantity of referents. They may do so by lexical means with words such as English a few, some, one, two, five hundred. However, not every language has a grammatical category of number. Grammatical number is expressed by morphological and/or syntactic means. That is, it is indicated by certain grammatical elements, such as through affixes or number words. Grammatical number may be thought of as the indication of semantic number through grammar. Languages that express quantity only by lexical means lack a grammatical category of number. For instance, in Khmer, neither nouns nor verbs carry any grammatical information concerning number: such information can only be conveyed by lexical items such as khlah 'some', pii-bey 'a few', and so on.. Most languages of the world have formal means to express differences of number. The most widespread distinction, as found in English and many other languages, involves a simple two-way number contrast between singular and plural (car / cars; child / children, etc.). Other more elaborate systems of number are described below. Obligatority of number marking In many languages, such as English, number is obligatorily expressed in every grammatical context; in other languages, however, number expression is limited to certain classes of nouns, such as animates (as with the suffix -men in Mandarin) or referentially prominent nouns (as with proximate forms in most Algonquian languages, opposed to referentially less prominent obviative forms). A very common situation is that plural number is not marked if there is any other overt indication of number (as for example in Hungarian: virág "flower"; virágok "flowers"; hat virág "six flowers"). Number agreement In many languages, verbs are also conjugated for number. Using French as an example, one says je vois (I see), but nous voyons (we see). The verb voir (to see) changes from vois in the first person singular to voyons in the plural. In everyday English, this often happens in the third person (she runs, they run), but not in other grammatical persons, with the exception of the verb to be. Adjectives often agree with the number of the noun they modify. For example, in French, one says un vieil arbre (an old tree), but des vieux arbres (some old trees). The singular adjective vieil becomes vieux in the plural, unlike English old, which remains unchanged. Other determiners may agree with number. In English, the demonstratives this, that change to these, those in the plural, and the indefinite article a, an is omitted or changed to some. In French and German, the definite articles have gender distinctions in the singular but not the plural. In Spanish and Portuguese, all articles are inflected for gender and number (e.g. Spanish el, la, los, las, un, una, unos, unas). Sometimes, grammatical number will not represent the actual quantity. For example, in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit neuter plurals took a singular verb. The plural form of a pronoun may also be applied to a single individual as a sign of importance or respect, as in the ''pluralis majestatis'' and in the T-V distinction, found in many languages, or, in English, when using the singular "they" for gender-neutrality. Although many languages treat collective nouns as singular, others interpret them as plural, as in the British English phrase the committee are meeting (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. 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 default 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 vs. singulative Some languages differentiate between a basic form (collective) which is indifferent in respect to number, and a more complicated derived form for single entities (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; e.g. Standard Arabic حجر ḥajar "stone" > حجرة ḥajarā "(individual) stone", بقر baqar "cattle" > بقرة baqarā "(single) cow" Dual number Main article: 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 Ancient Greek and Gothic, and it is common in the Slavic languages and in the Semitic languages, for example. 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 (a creole language, though only in the pronouns) have trial number. There is a hierarchy among the categories of number: No language distinguishes a trial unless having a dual, and no language has dual without a plural (Greenberg 1972). Nullar number Some languages, such as Latvian, have a nullar form, used for nouns that refer to zero objects. Other languages use either the singular or the plural form for zero. English, along with Germanic and most Romance languages, uses the plural. French and Brazilian Portuguese normally use the singular, instead. Paucal Paucal number, for a few (as opposed to many) instances of the referent (e.g. in Hopi, Warlpiri and in Arabic for some nouns) Distributive plural Distributive plural number, for many instances viewed as independent individuals (e.g. in Navajo). Inverse number The languages of the Kiowa-Tanoan family have three numbers — singular, dual, and plural — and exhibit an unusual system, called inverse number (or number toggling), of marking number. In this scheme, every countable noun has what might be called its "inherent" or "expected" numbers, and is unmarked for these numbers. When a noun appears in an inverse ("unexpected") number, it is inflected to mark this. For example, in Jemez, where nouns take the ending -sh to denote an inverse number, there are four noun classes, as follows: As can be seen, class-I nouns are inherently singular, class-II nouns are inherently plural, class-III nouns are inherently singular or plural. Class-IV nouns cannot be counted and are never marked with -sh. From (Sprott 1992, p. 53) A similar system is observed in Kiowa (Kiowa is distantly related to Tanoan languages like Jemez): Formal expression of number Synthetic languages typically distinguish grammatical number by inflection. (Note that analytic languages, such as Chinese, don't have grammatical number.) Below are some examples of number affixes for nouns (where the inflecting morpheme is underlined): Plurality is sometimes marked by a specialized number particle (or number word). This is frequent in Australian and Austronesian languages, such as Tagalog mga: bahay "house"; mga bahay "houses"). In Kapampangan, certain nouns optionally denote plurality by secondary stress ing laláki (man/singular) & ing babái (woman/singular) become ding láláki (man/plural) & ding bábái (woman/plural). In most languages, the singular is formally unmarked, whereas the plural is marked in some way. Some languages (typically 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. An alleged example of this situation is Desano, a Tucanoan language of Colombia. Cf. gasi "canoes" vs. gasiru "canoe"; yukü "trees" vs. yukügü "tree". Elements marking number may appear on nouns and pronouns in dependent-marking languages or on verbs and adjectives in head-marking languages. 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 yiłch’ígó’aah "he is teaching him" (resulting in yiłch’ídagó’aah "he is teaching them") while noun idilohí "cowboy" is unmarked for number. Additionally, number-marking may also occur via morphological agreement where the number must be marked similarly in all words referring to the same object. For example, in Finnish, we have Yöt ovat pimeitä "nights are dark" ("night-PL is-PL dark-PL-partitive"), where each word referring to the parent noun (yö "night") must be pluralized (PL), because the parent noun is pluralized (yöt "nights"). This can produce grammatical controversies with the T-V distinction, where the addressee is pluralized to show politeness. English English is typical of most world languages, in distinguishing only between singular and plural number. It does not distinguish among dual, trial, or paucal number. The plural form of a word is usually created by adding the suffix -(e)s. Pronouns have irregular plurals, as in I versus we, precisely because they are such common words. French In its written form, French, a Romance language, declines nouns for number (singular or plural). In terms of pronunciation, however, the majority of nouns (and adjectives) are not actually declined for number. This is because the suffix -(e)s, which typically marks plural nouns and adjectives, is normally silent, and thus does not really change anything; the plural article or determiner is the real indicator of plurality (but see liaison for a common exception to this). However, plural number still exists in spoken French because a significant percentage of irregular plurals differ from the singular in pronunciation; for example, cheval ("horse") is pronounced , while chevaux ("horses") is pronounced . Slovene Slovene, a Slavic language, is more complicated: = plural) Note: Hebrew In Hebrew, a Semitic language, most nouns have only singular and plural forms, such as sefer/sfarim ("book/books"), but some have singular, dual, and plural forms, such as yom/yomaim/yamim ("day/two days/days"). Some words occur so often in pairs that what used to be the dual form is now the general plural, such as ayin/eynayim ("eye/eyes," used even in a sentence like, "The spider has eight eyes."). Adjectives, verbs, and pronouns have only singular and plural, with the plural forms of these being used with dual nouns. Notes Bibliography See also | |||||||
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