Jump to content
Main menu
Main menu
move to sidebar
hide
Navigation
Main page
Recent changes
Random page
Help about MediaWiki
Special pages
Niidae Wiki
Search
Search
Appearance
Create account
Log in
Personal tools
Create account
Log in
Pages for logged out editors
learn more
Contributions
Talk
Editing
Grammatical number
(section)
Page
Discussion
English
Read
Edit
View history
Tools
Tools
move to sidebar
hide
Actions
Read
Edit
View history
General
What links here
Related changes
Page information
Appearance
move to sidebar
hide
Warning:
You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you
log in
or
create an account
, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
Anti-spam check. Do
not
fill this in!
===Verbs=== {{Main|Grammatical conjugation}} In many languages, verbs are conjugated according to number. Using French as an example, one says {{lang|fr|je vois}} (''I see''), but {{lang|fr|nous voyons}} (''we see''). The verb {{lang|fr|voir}} (''to see'') changes from {{lang|fr|vois}} in the first person singular to {{lang|fr|voyons}} in the plural. In everyday English, this often happens in the third person (''she sees'', ''they see''), but not in other grammatical persons, except with the verb ''to be''. <!-- The next paragraph makes no sense to me ([[User:Ruakh|Ruakh]]), and I don't see anything obviously relevant in the linked articles, so I'm commenting it out until someone can explain it. (I think the problem might just be a misuse of linguistics terms; it makes no sense for a verb to "refer" to a noun, but maybe here it's being used to mean that the noun is the subject of the verb?) Verbs may agree with the number of nouns to which they refer, even when there is no other form of number agreement in a language. For more information on this special type of number agreement, see [[Grammatical person]], [[Verb]], and [[English verbs]]. --> In English, and in Indo-European languages in general, the verb is singular or plural to match whether the subject of the sentence is singular or plural. Oppositely, in [[Xavante language|Xavante]], transitive verbs match the number of the object.<ref>{{cite thesis |degree=PhD |last=De Oliveira |first=Rosana Costa |year=2007 |title={{lang|pt|Morfologia e Sintaxe da Língua Xavante|cat=no}} |language=pt |url=https://livros01.livrosgratis.com.br/cp050936.pdf |page=75 |publisher=Federal University of Rio de Janeiro |access-date=2024-03-26 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240326004742/https://livros01.livrosgratis.com.br/cp050936.pdf |archive-date=2024-03-26 }}</ref> In [[Greenlandic language|West Greenlandic]], the verb is marked for the number of both the subject and the object.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Kahn |first1=Lily |last2=Valijärvi |first2=Riitta-Liisa |year=2022 |title=West Greenlandic: An Essential Grammar |series=Routledge Essential Grammars |location=London |publisher=Routledge |pages=142–143, 147–148 |doi=10.4324/9781315160863 |isbn=978-1-315-16086-3 }}</ref>
Summary:
Please note that all contributions to Niidae Wiki may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see
Encyclopedia:Copyrights
for details).
Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)
Search
Search
Editing
Grammatical number
(section)
Add topic