Plural Noun

A Plural Noun is a Noun that refers to a single Thing.

• AKA: Plural Word, Pluralized Noun.
• Context:
  • It can be:
    • a Plural Common Noun, such as “eggs”;
    • a Plural Proper Noun, such as “Canadians”.
    • a Plural Compound Noun, such as hard disks” and “sisters-in-law”.
• Example(s):
  • Plural(“egg”) ⇒ “eggs", as in “Those [eggs] are boiled.”.
  • Plural(“goose”) ⇒ “geese” or “gaggle” or “skein” (Collective Nouns).
  • Plural(“Canadian”) ⇒ “Canadians", as in “Five [Canadians] are missing.”.
  • Plural(“hard disk”) ⇒ “hard disks", a Plural Compound Noun.
  • Plural(“sister-in-law”) ⇒ “sisters-in-law", a Plural Compound Noun.
  • Plural Common Nouns: undergraduates scotches bric-a-brac products bodyguards facets coasts divestitures storehouses designs clubs fragrances averages subjectivists apprehensions muses factory-jobs … (from Penn Treebank).
  • Plural Proper Nouns: Americans Americas Amharas Amityvilles Amusements Anarcho-Syndicalists Andalusians Andes Andruses Angels Animals Anthony Antilles Antiques Apache Apaches Apocrypha … (from Penn Treebank).
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • “egg”.
  • “goose”.
  • “Canadian”, a Singular Proper Noun as in “She is a [Canadian].”.
  • “Jane Doe”, a Singular Proper Noun.
  • “sister-in-law”, a Singular Compound Noun.
  • “hard disk”, a Singular Compound Noun.
  • “gravel” a Mass Nouns (which are neither Singular Nouns nor Plural Nouns.
• See: Singular Noun, Morphological Process.

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References

1999

• (Manning and Schütze, 1999) ⇒ Christopher D. Manning and Hinrich Schütze. (1999). “Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing." The MIT Press.
  • QUOTE:Word categories are systematically related by morphological processes such as the formation of the plural form (dog-s). from the singular form of the noun (dog). Morphology is important in NLP because language is productive: in any given text we will encounter words and word forms that we haven't seen before and that are not in our precompiled dictionary. Many of these new words are morphologically related to known words. So if we understand morphological processes, we can infer a log about the syntactic and semantic properties of new words.

    The major types of morphological processes are inflection, derivation, and compounding. Inflections are the systematic modifications of a root form by means of prefixes and suffixes to indicate grammatical distinctions like singular and plural. Inflection does not change words class of meaning significantly, but varies features such as tense, number, and plurality. All the inflectional forms of a word are often grouped as manifestations of a single lexeme.

    Derivation is less systematic. It usually results in a more radical change of syntactic category, and it often involves a change in meaning. An example is the derivation of the adverb widely from the adjective wide (by appending the suffix -ly). “Widely in a phrase like it is widely believed means among a large well-dispersed group of people, a shift from the core meaning of wide (extending over a vast area). Adverb formation is also less systematic than plural inflection. Some adjectives like old or difficult don't have adverbs: *oldly and *difficultly are not words of English. Here are some other examples of derivations: the suffix -en transforms adjectives into verbs (weak-en, soft-en), the suffix -able transforms verbs into adjectives (understand-able, accept-able), and the suffix -er transforms verbs into nouns (teach-er, lead-er).

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