Plural

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Revision as of 07:42, 1 April 2007 by imported>Pieter Jansegers (plural as a language categroy)
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'Plural' is a grammatical category and a language universal.

In most languages it's directly opposed to the grammatical category of 'singular' but some languages have a third category, namely 'dualis'.

To put it simply:

singular refers to 1 referent

dualis refers to 2 referents (especially for living creatures)

plural refers to more referents

Ofcourse, that's too simple, because some singular words do refer to collections, groups, organisations and institutions [but considered as one entity: collective words] and some plural words do refer to one single referent.

In most languages the plural of words is marked in some way that makes it immediately clear to the audience that this category has been chosen.