In linguistics, grammatical number is a feature, in many languages, of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). English and many other languages present number categories of singular or plural. Some languages also have a dual, trial and paucal number or other arrangements. The word "number" is also used in linguistics to describe the distinction between certain grammatical aspects that indicate the number of times an event occurs, such as the semelfactive aspect, the iterative aspect, etc. For that use of the term, see "Grammatical aspect".
Overview Most languages of the world have formal means to express differences of number. One widespread distinction, found in English and many other languages, involves a simple two-way contrast between singular and plural number (car/cars, child/children, etc.). Discussion of other more elaborate systems of number appears below. Grammatical number is a morphological category characterized by the expression of quantity through inflection or agreement. As an example, consider the English sentences below:
The quantity of apples is marked on the noun—"apple" singular number (one item) vs. "apples" plural number (more than one item)—on the demonstrative, that/those, and on the verb, is/are. In the second sentence, all this information is redundant, since quantity is already indicated by the numeral two. A language has grammatical number when its noun forms are subdivided into morphological classes according to the quantity they express, such that:
Every noun form belongs to a number class (they are partitioned into disjoint classes by number). Noun modifiers (such as adjectives) and verbs may also have different forms for each number subclass and inflect to match the number of the nouns they modify or agree with (number is an agreement category). This is partly true for English: every noun and pronoun form is singular or plural (a few, such as "fish", "cannon" and "you", can be either, according to context). Some modifiers of nouns—namely the demonstrative determiners—and finite verbs inflect to agree with the number of the noun forms they modify or have as subject: this car and these cars are correct, while *this cars and *these car are incorrect. However, adjectives do not inflect for number, and many verb forms do not distinguish between singular and plural ("She/They went", "She/They can go", "She/They had gone", "She/They will go"). Many languages distinguish between count nouns and mass nouns. Only count nouns can be freely used in the singular and in the plural. Mass nouns, like "milk", "gold", and "furniture", are normally invariant. (In some cases, a normally mass noun X may be used as a count noun to collect several distinct kinds of X into an enumerable group; for example, a cheesemaker might speak of goat, sheep, and cow milk as milks.) Not all languages have number as a grammatical category. In those that do not, quantity must be expressed either directly, with numerals, or indirectly, through optional quantifiers. However, many of these languages compensate for the lack of grammatical number with an extensive system of measure words. Joseph Greenberg has proposed a number category hierarchy as a linguistic universal: "No language has a trial number unless it has a dual. No language has a dual unless it has a plural." This hierarchy does not account for the paucal.
Geographical distribution Obligatory plural marking of all nouns is found throughout the languages of western and northern Eurasia and most parts of Africa. The rest of the world's languages present a heterogeneous picture. Optional plural marking is common in Southeast and East Asia and Australian languages, and complete lack of plural marking is particularly found in New Guinea and Australian languages. In addition to the areal correlations, there also seems to be at least one correlation with morphological typology: isolating languages appear to favor no or non-obligatory plural marking. This can be seen particularly in Africa, where optionality or absence of plural marking is found particularly in the isolating languages of West Africa.
Types of number
Singular and plural
One of the simplest number distinctions a language can make is singular and plural. Singular denotes exactly one referent, while plural denotes more than one referent. For example, in English:
dog (singular, one) dogs (plural, two or more) To mark number, English has different singular and plural forms for nouns and verbs (in the third person): "my dog watches television" (singular) and "my dogs watch television" (plural). This is not universal: Wambaya marks number on nouns but not verbs, and Onondaga marks number on verbs but not nouns. Latin has different singular and plural forms for nouns, verbs, and adjectives, in contrast to English where adjectives do not change for number. Tundra Nenets can mark singular and plural on nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and postpositions. The most common part of speech to show a number distinction is pronouns. An example of a personal pronoun system distinguishing singular and plural is that of Wayoró:
Dual
As the singular denotes exactly one item, the dual number denotes exactly two items. For example, in Camsá:
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