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In
linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Ling ...
, singulative number and collective number (
abbreviated An abbreviation (from Latin ''brevis'', meaning ''short'') is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method. It may consist of a group of letters or words taken from the full version of the word or phrase; for example, the word ''abbrevia ...
and ) are terms used when the
grammatical number In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). English and other languages present number categories of ...
for multiple items is the
unmarked In linguistics and social sciences, markedness is the state of standing out as nontypical or divergent as opposed to regular or common. In a marked–unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one. The dominant defau ...
form of a noun, and the noun is specially marked to indicate a single item. This is the opposite of the more common
singular Singular may refer to: * Singular, the grammatical number that denotes a unit quantity, as opposed to the plural and other forms * Singular homology * SINGULAR, an open source Computer Algebra System (CAS) * Singular or sounder, a group of boar, ...
plural The plural (sometimes abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun. This ...
pattern, where a noun is unmarked when it represents one item, and is marked to represent more than one item. In some cases, a further distinction is made between the collective and what is known in some terminologies as the plurative, the former referencing multiple items as a class, the latter referencing them as individual units. Greenberg's linguistic universal #35 states that no language is purely singulative-collective in the sense that plural is always the null morpheme and singular is not.


Examples


Welsh

Welsh has two systems of grammatical number, singular–plural and collective–singulative. Since the loss of the noun
inflection In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and ...
system of earlier Celtic, plurals have become unpredictable and can be formed in several ways: by adding a
suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry ...
to the end of the word (most commonly ), as in "father" and "fathers", through vowel mutation, as in "boy" and "boys", or through a combination of the two, as in "sister" and "sisters". Other nouns take the singulative suffixes (for masculine nouns) or (for feminine nouns). Most nouns which inflect according to this system designate objects that are frequently found in groups, for example "birds/flock of birds", "bird"; "a bed of strawberries", "a strawberry"; "children", "a child"; and "forest", "a tree". Still other nouns use suffixes for both singular and plural forms (e.g. "a pony", "ponies", the unsuffixed * does not exist); these are similar to nouns formed from other categories of words (e.g. "charity" gives rise to "a beggar" and "beggars").


Other languages

Singulatives are featured in some Semitic and Slavic languages. In Arabic grammar, the singulative is called , "noun of unity". It is formed by the suffixes -''a(t)'' and -''ī''. The former applies to animals, plants, and inanimate objects, e.g. ''qamḥ'' "wheat", ''qamḥa(t)'' "a grain of wheat"; ''shajar'' 'trees', ''shajara(t)'' 'a tree'; ''baqar'' 'cattle'; ''baqara(t)'' 'a cow'. The latter suffix applies to sentient beings, e.g. ''
jinn Jinn ( ar, , ') – also romanized as djinn or anglicized as genies (with the broader meaning of spirit or demon, depending on sources) – are invisible creatures in early pre-Islamic Arabian religious systems and later in Islamic my ...
'' (collective), ''jinnī'' (singulative); ''zinj'' 'black African people', ''zinjī'' 'a black African person'. In some cases, the singulative has a further plural indicating a collection of the singular units, which may be broken (e.g. e.g., ''jund'' 'army', ''jundī'' 'a soldier', ''junūd'' 'soldiers') or regular (e.g. ''`askar'' 'army, military', ''`askarī'' 'a soldier, private, or enlisted man', ''`askarīyūn'' 'soldiers, privates, enlisted men'). In
East Slavic languages The East Slavic languages constitute one of three regional subgroups of the Slavic languages, distinct from the West and South Slavic languages. East Slavic languages are currently spoken natively throughout Eastern Europe, and eastwards to S ...
, which are basically of singular–plural system, the singular suffix -ин- ('-in-', Russian, '-yn-', Ukrainian), resp. '-ін-' ('-in-', Belarusian) performs the singulative function for collective nouns.p 47
/ref> Russian: ''gorokh'' (
pea The pea is most commonly the small spherical seed or the seed-pod of the flowering plant species ''Pisum sativum''. Each pod contains several peas, which can be green or yellow. Botanically, pea pods are fruit, since they contain seeds an ...
s in mass) vs. ''goroshina'' (a single pea). Ukrainian: /''pisok'' (
sand Sand is a granular material composed of finely divided mineral particles. Sand has various compositions but is defined by its grain size. Sand grains are smaller than gravel and coarser than silt. Sand can also refer to a textural class of ...
) vs. /''pischyna'' (grain of sand). Belarusian: (
potato The potato is a starchy food, a tuber of the plant ''Solanum tuberosum'' and is a root vegetable native to the Americas. The plant is a perennial in the nightshade family Solanaceae. Wild potato species can be found from the southern United ...
es in mass, e.g. as a crop or as a species) vs. (one potato tuber). Notice the affix '-a' in all these examples, which indicates the feminine form. Notice also that plural forms may be derived from these singulatives in a regular way: ''goroshina''->''goroshiny'' (several peas), etc. In both East Slavic and Arabic, the singulative form always takes on the feminine
gender Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most cultures ...
. Singulative markers are found throughout the
Nilo-Saharan languages The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50–60 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet. ...
. Majang, for example, has collective ''ŋɛɛti'' 'lice', singulative ''ŋɛɛti-n'' 'louse'. (Bender 1983:124). In Dutch, singulative forms of collective nouns are occasionally made by diminutives: ''snoep'' "sweets, candy" → ''snoepje'' "sweet, piece of candy". These singulatives can be pluralized like most other nouns: ''snoepjes'' "several sweets, pieces of candy".


Comparison with mass nouns

A collective form such as the Welsh , "pigs", is more basic than the singular form , "a pig". It is generally the collective form which is used as an adjectival modifier, e.g. ("pig meat", "pork"). The collective form is therefore similar in many respects to an English
mass noun In linguistics, a mass noun, uncountable noun, non-count noun, uncount noun, or just uncountable, is a noun with the syntactic property that any quantity of it is treated as an undifferentiated unit, rather than as something with discrete elemen ...
such as "rice", which in fact refers to a collection of items which are logically countable. However, English has no productive process of forming singulative nouns (just phrases such as "a grain of rice"). Therefore, English cannot be said to have singulative number.


Plurative

In some cases, in addition to the collective and singulative forms, a third form, called the "plurative" in the terminology of some scholars, is distinguished from the collective. The collective form, in these cases, denotes multiple items as a class while the plurative denotes them as individuals. Compare, for example, "people" in "People are funny" with "people" in "the people in this room", though in English the same plural form is used for both purposes. Example: In Arabic, for ''samak'', "fish": * ''samak'', collective form, fish in general * ''samak-at'', singulative, a single fish * ''ʔasmaak'', plurative, as in "many fish" or "three fish"


See also

*
Grammatical number In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). English and other languages present number categories of ...
*
Plural The plural (sometimes abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun. This ...


References


Bibliography

* Bender, M. Lionel. 1983. "Majang phonology and morphology". In ''Nilo-Saharan Language Studies'', 114–147. East Lansing: Michigan State University. * Corbett, Greville G. 2000. ''Number.'' Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cambridge University Press. {{ISBN, 0-521-33845-X * Tiersma, Peter Meijes. 1982. "Local and General Markedness." ''Language'' 58.4: 832-849 Grammatical number Welsh language