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In British English (BrE), collective nouns can take either singular (formal agreement) or plural (notional agreement) verb forms, according to whether the emphasis is on the body as a whole or on the individual members respectively; compare a committee was appointed with the committee were unable to agree.
English grammar is the set of structural rules of the English language.This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and whole texts.. This article describes a generalized, present-day Standard English – a form of speech and writing used in public discourse, including broadcasting, education, entertainment, government, and news, over a range of registers, from formal to ...
Meaning. Although the everyday meaning of plural is "more than one", the grammatical term has a slightly different technical meaning. In the English system of grammatical number, singular means "one (or minus one)", and plural means "not singular". In other words, plural means not just "more than one" but also "less than one (except minus one)".
In linguistics, grammatical number is a feature of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). [ 1] English and other languages present number categories of singular or plural, both of which are cited by using the hash sign (#) or by the numero signs "No." and "Nos ...
The plural verb forms are often used in British English with the singular forms of these countable nouns (e.g., "The team have finished the project."). Conversely, in the English language as a whole, singular verb forms can often be used with nouns ending in "-s" that were once considered plural (e.g., "Physics is my
Agreement based on grammatical person is found mostly between verb and subject. An example from English ( I am vs. he is) has been given in the introduction to this article. Agreement between pronoun (or corresponding possessive adjective) and antecedent also requires the selection of the correct person. For example, if the antecedent is the ...
The spelling rules given above are also very similar to those for the plural of nouns. The third person singular present of have is irregular: has /hæz/ (with the weak form /həz/ when used as an auxiliary, also contractable to -'s). The verbs do and say also have irregular forms, does /dʌz/ and says /sɛz/, which however look like regular ...
Impersonal verb. In linguistics, an impersonal verb is one that has no determinate subject. For example, in the sentence " It rains ", rain is an impersonal verb and the pronoun it corresponds to an exophoric referrent. In many languages the verb takes a third person singular inflection and often appears with an expletive subject.