Foreign languages faculty

Quality in terms of other grammar categories

The easiest way to tell if a noun is a singular noun or a plural noun is to look at how much of something it is referring to. If it is only referring to one person or thing, it is a singular noun. If it is referring to more than one person or thing, it is a plural noun.² This tip will help you even if you are dealing with those tricky collective nouns: pile is a singular noun referring to one collective group of things. Piles is a plural noun referring to more than one group of stuff. This tip will also help you deal with those uncooperative irregular plural nouns that always break the rules. For example, the word children looks like a singular noun because it doesn’t end in -s or -es. However, the word children refers to more than one child and so it is in fact a plural noun. This tip will help with especially tough words like mice or bacteria that really don’t look like they should be plural nouns. Finally, this tip is especially helpful when handling irregular plural nouns that are identical to their singular noun counterparts. Words like fish, moose, or species can be either singular or plural, and it will come down to the context of the sentence as to how to correctly use these words. Here are some example sentences using our tips to tell singular and plural nouns apart and to ensure that our sentences are grammatically correct:

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  We are going out to see a movie. (Movie refers to a single item. It is a singular noun and can use the article a.)
  
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  Geese swim in the lake by our house. (Geese is referring to more than one bird. It is a plural noun and uses the plural verb swim. Because it is plural, it can also stand by itself without an article.)
  

A plural noun is a word that is used to indicate that there is more than one person, animal, place, thing, or idea etc. The majority of singular nouns are made plural simply by adding an S on to the end of the word. However, there are many different rules depending on what letter the word ends in. There are also many irregular nouns that don’t follow the rules and these need to be learned and memorized. Plurality falls under the concept of grammatical number. So, one prefaces the discussion of plurality with a brief overview of grammatical number. Since this entry is written in English, one can consider grammatical number in English.
English nouns are either plural or singular, which is usually signaled by the presence or absence of the inflectional ending s. Thus, book (singular) contrasts with books (plural). However, some nouns have peculiar forms for singular and plural. For example, the plural of louse (singular) is lice (plural). Some nouns, like deer, do not take the suffix s, yet behave as both singular and plural. This is shown by the form of its preceding determiner and, should the noun be in the subject position, by the form of the main verb. Thus, in the sentence That deer is crossing the road, deer behaves like a singular noun, while in the sentence Those deer are crossing the road, it behaves like a plural noun. Still other nouns, such as police, behave only as grammatically plural. While every English noun must appear in either a singular or plural form, not every English noun may appear in both forms. On the contrary, English pronouns have both a singular (e.g., he, she, or it ) and a plural form (they ), which, for the most part, share no stem. In addition, as illustrated earlier, many English common nouns, known as count nouns, occur as both singular and plural nouns. By contrast, English proper nouns appear in the singular or plural form, but not both. The singular proper noun Aristotle does not occur in the plural (in the same relevant sense), nor does the plural proper noun the Andes occur in the singular. Moreover, English common nouns, such as dust and advice, called mass nouns, occur typically only in the singular. This division between nouns that can occur both in the singular and in the plural and those that do not occur is crosscut by words that cannot be preceded by the full range of English determiners and those that can be. Thus, English nouns can be partitioned into four classes. On the one hand, proper nouns and pronouns cannot be preceded by determiners, while common nouns can be; and on the other, count nouns and pronouns occur in both singular and plural forms, while mass nouns and proper nouns do not.
A paragraph is a basic unit of organization in writing in which a group of related sentence develops one main idea. A paragraph can be as short as one sentence or as long as ten sentences. The number of sentence in unimportant; however, the paragraph should be long enough to develop the main idea clearly. A paragraph may stand by itself. A paragraph may also be one part of a longer piece of writing such as chapter of a book or essay. A paragraph has three major structural parts: topic sentence, supporting sentence, and a concluding sentence. Regina defines paragraph is as a group of sentences that develops one main idea; in other word, a paragraph develops a topic. A topic is the subject of the paragraph; it is what the paragraph is about. Whereas, Sarada suggests that a paragraph is not a mere set of sentences put together one after another. Just as a sentence has a particular structure like subject and verb etc., so also a paragraph. In writing a research, it is needed some formulations of the problems to guide the research. In the previous part of the text, we have indicated the grammatical categories in which children frequently err in the acquisition of grammar content in the English language, i.e. the categories of irregular noun plurals and the Simple Past tense). Considering that the work focuses on teaching grammar to children of an early age, we have limited ourselves to the grammatical category of noun plurals which is, chiefly, introduced very early in the process of teaching English at an early age. In addition, we must also stress that instruction relating to these categories is largely present within the various activities that are implemented in English lessons for children of an early age, and primarily in children's songs and games. In the further text, we shall attempt to consolidate previous knowledge and cognisance regarding the problem of teaching the category of noun plurals in English lessons for children of an early age, and also to offer initiatives to aid junior grade pupils in overcoming difficulties regarding the acquisition of these grammatical categories. The word singular, when used in grammar, means “noting or pertaining to a member of the category of number found in many languages that indicates that a word form has one referent or denotes one person, place, thing, or instance.” By contrast, the word plural means “noting or pertaining to a member of the category of number, found in many languages, indicating that a word has more than one referent.” In short, this means that a singular noun refers to only one person or thing and a plural noun refers to more than one person or thing. Count nouns are discrete, individual entities – items that you can count. Mass nouns, sometimes called uncountable or non-count nouns, refer to an undifferentiated mass or collection of material.³