"Does this wish, then, extend to the
plural number?" asked Julia, smiling a little maliciously.
By a like pleasant fiction his single chamber was always mentioned in a
plural number. In its disengaged times, the tobacconist had announced it in his window as
You ought to speak of other States in the
plural number; not one of them is a city, but many cities, as they say in the game.
Not the less does nature continue to fill the heart of youth with suggestions of this enthusiasm, and there are now men,--if indeed I can speak in the
plural number,--more exactly, I will say, I have just been conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.
The
plural number caused the captain to toss me a contemptuous look.
Miss Slowboy, in the mean time, who had a mechanical power of reproducing scraps of current conversation for the delectation of the baby, with all the sense struck out of them, and all the nouns changed into the
plural number, inquired aloud of that young creature, Was it Gruffs and Tackletons the toymakers then, and Would it call at Pastry-cooks for wedding-cakes, and Did its mothers know the boxes when its fathers brought them homes; and so on.
Nevertheless, despite the flexibility and variation of the collective noun with respect to verb number, this study demonstrates that the influence of the oblique noun, in particular of its morphology, is one of the determining factors of the
plural number of the main verb.
Twardzisz (1998:259) applied Langacker's approach to nouns in relation to names of fish in Polish, such as pstrqg 'trout', whose singular form refers to
plural number, for example, jeziora peine pstrqga 'lakes full of trout'.
Many instances of
plural number marking in Old English disyllabic neuter a-stem nouns appear uncertain.
The announcement did not name the people arrested or even say how many were arrested, just that it was a
plural number. It did not say where or when they were arrested or what evidence linked them to the oranges or to a political "smear" plot.
4 The answers to the following questions can be found amongst the 31 UK Shipping Area names as broadcast on BBC Radio 4 (occasionally the names will apply to more than one category): i) 5 rivers, ii) 5 first and/or second names, iii) a type of pullover, iv) a famous C19th sea battle, v) a
plural number, vi) a type of common cement, vii) are prefixed by compass points (3), viii) an aggressive Scandinavian warrior, ix) an expensive flatfish (two words) & x) an archaic English word meaning man or person.