The couple is going to purchase the house? Or the couple are going to purchase the house? Even after all my years of editing, I can still get tripped up trying to make verbs agree with collective ...

Readers of this column won't have trouble coming up with the plural version of most nouns. For example, we almost instinctively know that the plural of "boat" is "boats." But a special category of ...

Let us start with extracting from the underspecified lexical of the noun book the features of Count and Plural: First, let us suppose that the Nil feature Plural is specified as [+Pl], a rule occurrin ...

It’s spring cleaning time — an opportunity to sweep out dust bunnies lurking in recesses of recent reading. Let’s start with various forms of disagreement between singular and plural elements in a ...

Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about English grammar and usage — most of which I promptly forgot. And not for lack of use. Every day I apply what I’ve learned to catch and fix writers’ mistakes.

What do erotica, stamina, and candelabra have in common? Oh, stop it. The answer is that they are all singular nouns that started off plural. In Latin, nouns that end in –um when alone often end in –a ...

Of all the grammar concepts we have, "plural" seems to be one of the most straightforward. You got one thing? It's singular. Got more than one thing? It's plural. But alas, language is always less ...