Partitive plural is a
grammatical number
In linguistics, grammatical number is a Feature (linguistics), feature of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement (linguistics), agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). English and many other ...
that is used to modify a noun which represents a part of some whole amount, as opposed to the
comprehensive plural, used when the noun represents the total amount of something.
It can be found in
partitive case
In linguistics, a partitive is a word, phrase, or case that indicates partialness. Nominal partitives are syntactic constructions, such as "some of the children", and may be classified semantically as either set partitives or entity partitives ba ...
in
Finnish. One of its uses in Finnish is to express a part of a larger object, or a subset of a group of several objects.
An example in Finnish would be the difference between the use of partitive and accusative:
Finnish influenced
J.R.R. Tolkien in inventing his
fictional language
Fictional languages are the subset of constructed languages (conlangs) that have been created as part of a fictional setting (e.g. for use in a book, movie, television show, or video game). Typically they are the creation of one individual, while ...
Quenya
Quenya ()Tolkien wrote in his "Outline of Phonology" (in '' Parma Eldalamberon'' 19, p. 74) dedicated to the phonology of Quenya: is "a sound as in English ''new''". In Quenya is a combination of consonants, ibidem., p. 81. is a constructed l ...
, being present in that language as one of four grammatical numbers in Quenya, the others being
singular
Singular may refer to:
* Singular, the grammatical number that denotes a unit quantity, as opposed to the plural and other forms
* Singular or sounder, a group of boar, see List of animal names
* Singular (band), a Thai jazz pop duo
*'' Singula ...
,
dual, and
plural
In many languages, a plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated as pl., pl, , or ), is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than ...
.
See also
*
Partitive
In linguistics, a partitive is a word, phrase, or Grammatical case, case that indicates partialness. Nominal (linguistics), Nominal partitives are syntactic constructions, such as "some of the children", and may be classified semantically as either ...
References
Links
Article about usage of the partitive case in the plural in Finnish
{{grammar-stub
Grammatical number