ESL-lover said:Hi my friends...........
Tell me about collective nouns like family,people etc....
Is it singluar or plural?
Can I say family is or family are?
Thank you very much....................
RonBee said:ESL-lover said:Hi my friends...........
Tell me about collective nouns like family,people etc....
Is it singluar or plural?
Can I say family is or family are?
Thank you very much....................
Nouns like family are, in AE, almost invariable construed as singular. Thus it would be: "The family is...." In BE it's a little more complicated. If the emphasis is on the collective use singular. If the emphasis is on the individuals use plural.
People is not a collective noun. Instead, it is a plural of person.
8)
Used as a plural people is a form with no exactly corresponding singular. (English is not odd in this respect: the equivalent word is anomalous in Spanish, Italian, Russian, and many other languages.) In the past, grammarians have sometimes insisted that people is a collective noun that should not be used as a substitute for persons when referring to a specific number of individuals, as in Six people were arrested. But people has always been used in such contexts, and the distinction is now so widely ignored in general writing that it seems pedantic to insist on it. Persons is still preferred in quasilegal contexts, however, as in Vehicles containing fewer than three persons may not use the left lane during rush hours. Only the singular person is used in compounds involving a specific numeral: a six-person car; a two-person show. But people is used in other compounds: people mover; people power. These examples are exceptions to the general rule that plural nouns cannot be used in such compounds; note that we do not say teethpaste or books-burning.
Used as a plural people is a form with no exactly corresponding singular.
ESL-lover said:There is also singular noun people (plural peoples) meaning nation.
ESL-lover said:Persons is sometimes used as a plural of person in official language.
Lib said:When you say that 'people' is sometimes used as a singular noun, are you implying that it would take a singular verb?