Plural is a grammatical number, typically referring to more than one of the referent in the real world. In linguistics grammatical number is a Grammatical category of nouns pronouns and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one" In general a reference is a relation between objects in which one object designates by linking to another object

In the English language, singular and plural are the only grammatical numbers. English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States

In English, nouns, pronouns, and demonstratives inflect for plurality. In Linguistics and Grammar, a pronoun is a Pro-form that substitutes for a (including a noun phrase consisting of a single Noun) with or Demonstratives are deictic words (they depend on an external frame of reference that indicate which entities a speaker refers to and distinguishes those entities from others In Grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as tense, mood, voice (See English plural. In the English Language, Nouns are inflected for Grammatical number —that is singular or Plural. ) In many other languages, for example German and the various Romance languages, articles and adjectives also inflect for plurality. The German language (de ''Deutsch'') is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages. The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages, or Neolatin languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all In Grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a Noun or Pronoun, giving more information about the For example, in the English sentence "The brown cats are running", only the noun and verb are inflected; but in the German sentence "Die braunen Katzen rennen", every word (article, noun, adjective, and verb) is inflected.

In many languages, including a number of Indo-European languages, there is also a dual number (used for indicating two objects). Dual is a Grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and Plural. Some other grammatical numbers present in various languages include trial (for three objects) and paucal (for a few objects). In linguistics grammatical number is a Grammatical category of nouns pronouns and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one" In linguistics grammatical number is a Grammatical category of nouns pronouns and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one" In languages with dual, trial, or paucal numbers, plural refers to numbers higher than those (i. e. more than two, more than three, or many). However, numbers besides singular, plural, and to a lesser extent dual, are extremely rare. Languages with measure words such as Chinese and Japanese lack any significant grammatical number at all, though they are likely to have plural personal pronouns. In Linguistics, measure words, known more formally as numeral classifiers and also called counters, count words, counter words, or is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities Personal pronouns are Pronouns used as substitutes for proper or common Nouns.

Some languages distinguish between a plural and a greater plural. A greater plural refers to an abnormally large number for the object of discussion. It should also be noted that the distinction between the paucal, the plural, and the greater plural is often relative to the type of object under discussion. For example, for oranges the paucal number might imply less than ten, whereas for the population of a country it might be used for a few hundred thousand.

The Austronesian language Sursurunga has singular, dual, paucal, greater paucal, and plural. Lihir, another Austronesian language, has singular, dual, trial, paucal, and plural. The Lihir language is spoken in the Lihir island group in New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea. These are probably the languages with the most complex grammatical number.

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. Dutch ( is a West Germanic language spoken by around 24 million people 22 million of which are from the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname Italian ( or lingua italiana) is a Romance language spoken by about 63 million people as a First language, primarily in Italy. Portuguese ( or língua portuguesa) is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia (Spain and northern Portugal. 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. The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages) a group of closely related Languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages The Baltic languages are a group of related languages belonging to the Indo-European language family and spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic 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). Polish ( język polski, polszczyzna) is the Official language of Poland. In addition, Slovenian preserved pure dual, using it for numbers ending in 2. Slovene or Slovenian ( slovenski jezik or slovenščina, not to be confused with Slovenčina) is a South Slavic language 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). The Serbo-Croatian language or Croato-Serbian language (cрпскохрватски језик srpskohrvatski jezik) is a South Slavic Diasystem In Linguistics, a collective noun is a word used to define a group of objects where "objects" can be People, Animals Inanimate things For example, there are two ways to say leaves: lišće (collective) is used in "Leaves are falling from the trees", but listovi (counting) is used in "Those are some beautiful leaves".

In English, mass nouns and abstract nouns have plurals in less common instances. In Linguistics, a mass noun (also uncountable noun or non-count noun) is a common Noun that presents entities as an unbounded mass 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. "

Sources

• Corbett, Greville. Number (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge University Press, 2000. Cambridge University Press (known colloquially as CUP is a Publisher given a Royal Charter by Henry VIII in 1534 2000 ( MM) was a Leap year that started on Saturday of the Common Era, in accordance with the Gregorian calendar.
• GNU gettext utilities (section 11.2.6 - Additional functions for plural forms) (Treatment of zero and the plurality based on the final digits)

See also

• Collective number
• Dual grammatical number
• English plural
• Grammatical number
• Plurale tantum
• Pluralis majestatis
• Romance plurals

In Linguistics, singulative number and collective number are terms used when the Grammatical number for multiple items is the unmarked form Dual is a Grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and Plural. In the English Language, Nouns are inflected for Grammatical number —that is singular or Plural. In linguistics grammatical number is a Grammatical category of nouns pronouns and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one" A plurale tantum (plural pluralia tantum) is a noun that appears only in the Plural form and does not have a singular variant though it may still refer The majestic plural ( pluralis majestatis in Latin) is the use of a Plural Pronoun to refer to a single person holding a high office such as The La Spezia-Rimini Line (or more precisely Massa-Senigallia Line demarcates some important distinctions between Romance languages north and west of it ( Portuguese

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