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Grammatical number

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In linguistics, the term grammatical number refers to ways of expressing quantity by inflecting words. In the English sentences below, the number of apples is indicated in three different ways:

That fresh apple is on the table.
Those fresh apples are on the table.
On one hand, the noun "apple" appears in its singular form in the first sentence, and in its plural form in the second sentence. On the other hand, the verb "to be" and the demonstrative pronoun "that" also have different forms according to the quantity of apples. More generally, some parts of speech that refer to a noun are inflected to reflect the quantity denoted by the noun. This is called number agreement.

Not all languages express quantity through inflection. In the following two examples, no words are inflected for number:

There is one fresh apple on the table.
There is more than one fresh apple on the table.
Instead, quantity is shown by independent particles with a specifically quantitative meaning ("one" and "more than one"). Some languages only allow this kind of construction.; they can still express quantities, but they lack grammatical number. Many of these, such as Mandarin, are analytic languages. In languages without inflectional noun classes, quantities may still be expressed through independent particles called measure words.

The term number is also used to describe the distinction between certain grammatical aspects that indicate the number of times an event occurs (e.g. semelfactive aspect, iterative aspect, etc.). For that use, see Grammatical aspect.

Contents

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.See, for example, the Linguistic sketch in [Khmer] article at [UCLA Language Materials project]..

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.

Types of 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 it is often found in Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages. Number classes in language include:

Many currently spoken languages, and nearly all modern Indo-European languages, use only plural and singular 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).

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).

Number agreement

In many languages, verbs are 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 (old) 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 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 may be applied to a single individual as a sign of importance or reverence, as in the pluralis majestatis, 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 (agreement in sensu); the use of this type of construction varies with dialect and level of formality.

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").

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.

English
(dependent-marking) 		Western Apache
(head-marking)
Paul is teaching the cowboy. Paul idilohí yiłch’ígó’aah.
Paul is teaching the cowboys. Paul idilohí yiłch’ídagó’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 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.

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:

class description singular dual plural
I animate nouns - -sh -sh
II some inanimate nouns -sh -sh -
III other animate nouns - -sh -
IV mass (non-countable) nouns (n/a) (n/a) (n/a)

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):

class singular dual plural
I - - -gɔ
II -gɔ - -
III -ɡɔ - -ɡɔ
IV (n/a) (n/a) (n/a)

Number in specific languages

Indo-European

English

English is typical of languages that have only singular and plural number. English does not distinguish among dual, trial, or paucal number. The plural form of a word is usually created by adding the suffix -s. Pronouns are irregular precisely because they are so common, such as the singular I and the plural we.

See English plural for detail.

Slovene

Slovene, a Slavic language, is more complicated:

Note:

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 -s suffix, which typically marks plural nouns and adjectives, is normally silent (but see liaison for an exception), and thus does not really change anything; the plural article or determiner is the real indicator of plurality. However, plural number still exists in French because some irregular plurals do differ from the singular in pronunciation; for example, cheval ("horse") is pronounced [ʃəval], while chevaux ("horses") is pronounced [ʃəvo].

Afro-Asiatic

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.

See also

Bibliography

Notes

 

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