Peculiar Plurals and Senseless Singulars: How Meaning-Full...

Peculiar Plurals and Senseless Singulars: How Meaning-Full is Number Agreement?

Erica L. Middleton

Kathryn Bock

Jay Verkuilen

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Running head: Meaning and Agreement

Word count: 2500

Please address correspondence to:

Erica L. Middleton

Department of Psychology

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

603 East Daniel St.

Champaign, IL 61820

(217) 244-5494

[email protected]

Meaning and agreement

Abstract

The part that meaning plays in the syntax of language is an age-old lightning rod

for controversy. Like other elements of grammar, number agreement has been argued to

reflect concrete notional properties (e.g., referential number) or relatively arbitrary

linguistic properties (e.g., grammatical number). To date, however, there are no

evaluations of how much notional number contributes to the control of number

agreement. The present work performed this evaluation for verb number-agreement in

English by creating conditions where systematic gradations in the notional number of

subject noun-phrases diverged from or converged on their conventional (so-called

grammatical) number. Verb number was overwhelmingly but not fully aligned with the

grammatical number of the subject in all conditions. The results demarcate a role for

meaning in number agreement, and put claims for pervasive notional effects into clearer

perspective.

Keywords: agreement, notion, number, syntax


In March 2004, the weekly Puzzler on National Public Radio’s popular Car Talk program

was not an automotive mystery, but a quirk of subject-verb agreement. It went something

like this:

Conjunctions in English (e.g., Tom and Ray; a Buick and a Honda)

are almost always followed by plural verbs, as in Tom and Ray are

brothers, not Tom and Ray is brothers. When can conjunctions be

followed by singular verbs?

The answer was that conjoined subjects take singular verbs when the conjunction

refers to just one thing. For instance, Car Talk’s (apocryphal) lawyers, a firm

called Dewey, Cheetham, and Howe, is singular and not plural. Along similar

lines, although the phrase United States is superficially plural, when it refers to the

country its normal number, for purposes of agreement, is singular.

The Puzzler illustrates one of the gray areas of language use. Prescriptively,

grammatical agreement means that singular subjects take singular verbs and plural

subjects take plural verbs. Obviously, this is not uniformly true. Yet, because of its

reputed simplicity and heavy-handed treatment by grammar-school teachers,

agreement suffers from a reputation as an effete triviality of language, the linguistic

equivalent of the tea-drinker’s cocked little finger.

The banality of agreement masks its complexity and its centrality to an

understanding of how language works. Children acquire and reliably use the

devices of agreement long before formal schooling enforces them. Speakers of

English and many other languages engage in the cognitive dynamics of agreement

every few seconds in spontaneous speech, converging on acceptable outcomes.


Agreement dynamics are routinely set into motion by subtle perceptual

discriminations and conceptual categorizations involving the fundamental features

of numerosity in the world, a product of the transformation from perception and

conception into language. Within influential contemporary linguistic theories,

beginning with Gazdar, Klein, Pullum, and Sag (1985), the mechanisms of

agreement are basic building blocks for virtually all syntactic devices of language.

This puts matters of agreement at the center of accounts for psycholinguistic

phenomena ranging from structural disambiguation to pronoun resolution.

The vagaries of agreement are well known in linguistics (Morgan, 1984)

and psycholinguistics (Bock, 2004; Thornton & MacDonald, 2003; Vigliocco &

Hartsuiker, 2002). What is unknown and widely debated is how to account for

them. Because there are principled notional deviations from so-called grammatical

agreement (as the Puzzler illustrates), and because there are strong correlations

between number meaning and the normal co-variations in singular and plural

number that make up conventional grammatical agreement, several proposals have

argued for more thoroughgoing notional approaches to agreement (see Barlow,

1991; Dowty & Jacobson, 1988 for linguistic treatments and Berg, 1998; Reid,

1991; and Vigliocco & Franck 1999, 2001 for corpus-based and psycholinguistic

approaches). There is an elegant parsimony in these responses to variability in

grammatical agreement: If agreement is neither simple nor superficial covariation,

perhaps it rests predominantly or even entirely on conceptualization.

The strong correlation between number meaning and conventional

grammatical number makes it an empirical challenge to put accurate limits on


theoretical claims that agreement makes maximal use of notional information

(Vigliocco & Harsuiker, 2002), or that “semantic criteria play a dominant part in

English [agreement]” (Berg, 1998, p. 67). Eberhard, Cutting, and Bock (in press)

proposed an explicit model of agreement in which notional number is modulated by

the syntax of agreement controllers (such as subject noun phrases, in the case of

verb agreement) coupled with their lexical-grammatical number properties. The

purpose of the present work was to put specific limits on such accounts with a

controlled parametric evaluation of the notional contribution to agreement.

To do this, we examined deviations from conventional agreement for sentence

subjects that differed systematically in their notional and grammatical number properties.

We elicited verb number agreement after subjects that contained two types of

conventionally singular nouns, singular count nouns (e.g., candle) and mass nouns (e.g.,

firewood), and two types of conventionally plural nouns, pluralia tantum (invariant

plurals; e.g., fireworks) and plural count nouns (e.g., candles). Notional (i.e., referential)

number for the nouns was either more (singular count, plural count) or less (mass,

pluralia tantum) congruent with conventional grammatical number, yielding graded

notional number values that progressively increased from more singular to more plural

senses within the same semantic fields (e.g., candle, firewood, fireworks, candles). To

the degree that notional number informs agreement, agreement with conventional number

should be less likely when grammatical and notional number diverge than when they

align. The notional influence was assessed in terms of the change in grammatically

consistent responding as a function of the deviation of notional from grammatical

number.


Participants created sentences that began with subject nouns of the four critical

types. To increase variability in agreement the subject phrases also included local nouns--

singular or plural count nouns in adjunct phrases (see Table 1). Local noun plurality

perturbs normal agreement when subjects are singular, a phenomenon known as

attraction (Bock & Miller, 1991). Our expectation was that the detection of notional

effects within the normally reliable implementation of subject-verb agreement would

require the disruptions to agreement that attraction produces.

Method

Participants

Ninety-six undergraduates, native speakers of American English, completed the

experiment for course credit.

Materials

We created 32 sets of sentence preambles with eight preambles each (Table 1).

Every set contained four conceptually related head nouns and one local noun. The head

nouns comprised a count singular (e.g., candle), its corresponding plural (e.g., candles), a

pluralia tantum (e.g., fireworks), and a mass noun (e.g., firewood). Local nouns were

selected to be equivalently sensible in combination with the four head nouns, without

biasing distributive readings (Eberhard, 1999). Every head noun occurred with both the

singular and plural forms of the local noun. An additional 74 filler preambles had unique

simple and complex subject noun phrases, 29 with singular and 45 with plural heads.

There were eight lists. Every list contained all 74 fillers and 32 versions of the

experimental preambles, one from each set. The experimental preambles were

counterbalanced across lists to equate the number of preambles representing each


condition on every list. Experimental trials were separated by one to three fillers.

Preamble order was the same in all lists with eight fillers at the beginning.

Norming. Norms were collected on imageability, sensibility, and notional number

for the experimental preambles. The norming was performed by 192 participants, divided

equally among the three types of norming tasks and the eight lists created for the

agreement study. Imageability was rated on a seven-point scale (where 1= low

imageability) with judges indicating how easily each phrase evoked a mental image

(Eberhard, 1999). Sensibility was rated on a five-point scale (1 denoting nonsense and 5

denoting completely sensible). Notional number judgments required participants to decide

whether the phrase as a whole referred to "one thing" or "more than one thing"

(Humphreys & Bock, in press). Condition means and confidence intervals for all ratings

are given in Table 1. None of the conditions differed significantly on imageability or

sensibility. For notional number, each type of phrase differed significantly from every

other. Local noun plurality weakly (and nonsignificantly) increased the rated notional

number.

Table 1

Sample preamble set with mean ratings of sensibility, imageability, and notional number

for each preamble condition and the 95% Scheffé confidence intervals for the difference

between two means

Ratings

Sample preamble set

Head noun

Local noun

Sensibility

Imageability

Notional

number


The candle for the ceremony singular count singular 4.07 4.98 0.17

The firewood for the ceremony mass singular 3.94 5.01 0.45

The fireworks for the ceremony pluralia tantum singular 3.84 4.95 0.67

The candles for the ceremony plural count singular 4.00 5.11 0.81

The candle for the ceremonies singular count plural 4.00 5.07 0.20

The firewood for the ceremonies mass plural 3.91 5.07 0.44

The fireworks for the ceremonies pluralia tantum plural 3.83 4.93 0.67

The candles for the ceremonies plural count plural 4.05 5.05 0.83

Range of ratings

95% Scheffe confidence interval

3.84-4.07

0.26

4.93-5.11

0.31

.17-.83

0.09

Agreement Elicitation

Participants were run singly, receiving one of the eight lists. Preambles were

presented auditorily and participants repeated and completed each one as a full sentence.

Responses were recorded onto digital audiotape through a headset microphone. The task

took approximately ten minutes to complete.

Scoring

Responses were transcribed and verbs were scored as singular, plural, uninflected

for number (e.g., regular past tense), or miscellaneous error (e.g., failure to accurately

repeat preamble) following the criteria in Bock, Nicol, and Cutting (1999). Table 2 gives

the distributions of scores as a function of head type and local number.

Table 2


Percentages of singular, plural, uninflected, and miscellaneous responses as a function of

head noun type and local noun number

Head Type Response Type Local Noun Number

Singular Count Plural Count

Singular Count singular 76% (293) 67% (258)

plural 0% (1) 7% (25)

uninflected 22% (86) 20% (76)

miscellaneous 1% (4) 7% (25)

Mass singular 73% (279) 66% (255)

plural 3% (13) 11% (44)

uninflected 22% (84) 18% (69)


Pluralia Tantum singular 3% (11) 2% (9)

plural 73% (281) 78% (301)

uninflected 18% (71) 14% (55)


Plural Count singular 1% (4) 1% (5)

plural 78% (299) 77% (295)

uninflected 17% (64) 17% (66)



Results

Figure 1 shows the mean notional plurality ratings of the preambles along with the

observed overall proportions of plural agreement for each type of head noun. Clearly, the

notional effect is small. To evaluate it with more precision we used multinomial logistic

regression, a generalization of binary logistic regression, to model response probabilities

(Agresti, 2002). Two major response types were defined corresponding to (1)

conventionally grammatical (i.e., singular verb given singular count or mass head; plural

verb given plural count or pluralia tantum head) and (2) ungrammatical (i.e., plural verb

given singular count or mass head and singular verb given plural count or pluralia tantum

head). Ungrammatical responses in the pluralia tantum and mass conditions are most

likely to reflect notional agreement. The model encompassed two other response types

corresponding to the uninflected and miscellaneous scores, but their probabilities changed

very little over conditions and are not discussed further.

Figure 1. Proportions of plural-agreeing verbs produced with four

types of subject noun phrases (collapsed across local number) and

notional plurality ratings of the same phrases


Three independent variables were entered into the model. One was congruency of

grammatical and notional number, with the singular and plural count conditions classified

as grammatically and notionally congruent and the mass and pluralia tantum conditions

classified as grammatically and notionally incongruent. The second variable was

consistency of head and local grammatical number: Heads and locals with matching

number were consistent and heads and locals with different number were inconsistent.

The third variable captured the disparity between grammatical and notional number as the

absolute deviation in a preamble’s notional-number rating from its conventional

grammatical number (0=singular, 1=plural). For example, mass-noun preambles with a

notional rating of .75 had a deviation score of |0-.75|=.75; pluralia-tantum preambles with

a notional plurality rating of .25 had a deviation score of |1-.25|=.75.

In the data, response profiles were highly skewed because speakers provided

grammatical responses about 73% of the time. This put a strong upper bound on the

additional predictive power of the independent variables. Despite this limitation, the

model disclosed significant effects of notional deviation as well as local consistency on

the likelihood of ungrammatical responses, and a significant effect of local consistency

on grammatical responses. Thus, the null hypothesis that all independent variables are

equal to zero was rejected (! 2 = 73.301 on df 9, p < 0.000).

To generate the predicted response probabilities, maximum likelihood estimation

was used to create log-odds parameters for each independent variable in the regression

model from the observed distribution of responses in each response category. A logistic

function transformed the log-odds values into the modeled response probabilities shown

in Figure 2 for grammatical and ungrammatical responses (observed probabilities are


shown in gray, collapsed over local noun consistency). The measure shown is the

probability of each type of response out of all response options for each condition as a

function of notional deviation (ranging from 0 to 1, congruent to fully incongruent with

grammatical number).

Figure 2. Probabilities of conventionally grammatical (upper panel) and ungrammatical

(lower panel) agreement as a function of deviation between notional and grammatical

number for grammatically congruent (grammatical and notional number converge) and

grammatically incongruent (grammatical and notional number diverge) subjects


Figure 2 reveals several notable patterns. Grammatical responses are far more

likely than ungrammatical: Even with maximum notional deviation the predicted average

probability of a grammatical response is .69 compared to .10 for ungrammatical

responses. Still, congruence between notional and grammatical number promotes

grammatical responses (top panel) and incongruence promotes ungrammatical responses

(bottom panel), raising the likelihood of notionally appropriate verb number for pluralia

tantum and mass nouns. Moreover, increasing deviations between notional and

grammatical number are associated with decreasing likelihoods of grammatical

responding and increasing likelihoods of ungrammatical responding. These effects are

clearest with inconsistent head and local noun number. As the difference between

notional and grammatical number increases from congruent and minimally deviant to

incongruent and maximally deviant, the predicted likelihood of grammatical responding

decreases 10.5% and the predicted likelihood of ungrammatical responding increases

14.7%. In short, although grammatical number dominated agreement, variability in

agreement was systematically related to notional number.

Discussion

Notional number agreement is a rare event compared to grammatical agreement in

English, even when notional number contradicts grammatical number, but it is

predictably linked to variations in the notional number of agreement controllers. There

are two clear implications for explanations of normal language use. The first is a

challenge to recurrent efforts in linguistics and psychology to reduce matters of syntax in


general and agreement in particular to questions about meaning. Reid (1991) devoted a

book to the argument that in English, “neither the grammatical number of the verb nor

that of its subject determines the other. Each is chosen for its semantic value …” (p. 4).

Our data cast doubt on strong claims of this kind.

The second implication is complementary. There are indeed instances of notional

agreement, and they promise to illuminate our understanding of how language works.

Regardless of whether they constitute principled cases of control from meaning or

unintended errors, they disclose some of the mechanisms of normal speaking. To serve

this purpose, however, their incidence must be kept in perspective. Providing this

perspective, and putting numbers on it, is what the present work does.

It could be argued that the findings are aberrant. The results might underestimate

notional agreement because of the controlled nature of the task or speakers’ efforts to

monitor for ungrammaticality. However, spontaneous speech is not notably

ungrammatical, even among children who have little awareness of prescriptive rules of

agreement (e.g., four-year-olds have been found to produce conventional grammatical

agreement over 94% of the time in spontaneous speech; Keeney & Wolfe, 1972). For his

treatise on notional number agreement, Reid (1991) culled cases of agreement from both

speech and writing but reported the rates at which subject and verb number were

grammatically consistent for only one written sample (Table 7.1, p. 253). In that sample,

verbs agreed with the grammatical number of their subjects 99.1% of the time. By this

standard, the 10% likelihood of notional agreement when notional number was fully

divergent from grammatical number is a ten-fold overestimate of its incidence.


Another kind of objection involves the language in which our data were collected,

American English. Agreement in English is simple and agreement morphology is

minimal. Yet the effects of notional support in languages with more complicated

agreement systems and more elaborate morphology can be even smaller: Vigliocco and

Franck’s (1999) contention that meaning permeates agreement was based on a 2% to 3%

increase in agreement accuracy in French and Italian that accompanied the presence of

congruent notional gender; in Vigliocco and Franck (2001), the corresponding increase

was 3%. For number, with translation-equivalent materials across Spanish and English,

enhanced notional plurality (in the form of distributivity) increased plural agreement by

8.2% among native Spanish speakers and by 10.2% among native English speakers

(Bock, Carreiras, Meseguer, & Octigan, 2004).

In short, notional number affected agreement, but weakly. As in Eberhard et al.

(in press), theories of language production must aim to account for the actual magnitudes

of these effects instead of emphasizing meaning at the expense of syntax or syntax at the

expense of meaning. Both are integral to the creation of speech. Enough is known about

both for theories of language use to achieve more precise and balanced explanations of

how meaning and syntax cooperate when language is produced or understood in ongoing

time.


References

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Barlow, M. (1991). The agreement hierarchy and grammatical theory. In L. A. Sutton &

C. Johnson (Eds.), Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley

Linguistics Society. (pp. 30-40). Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society.

Berg, T. (1998). The resolution of number conflicts in English and German agreement

patterns. Linguistics, 36, 41-70.

Bock, J. K. (2004). Psycholinguistically speaking: Some matters of meaning, marking,

and morphing. In B. H. Ross (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation.

(Vol. 44, pp. 109-144). San Diego, CA: Elsevier.

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in Spanish and English: Similarities in the role of conceptual constraints. Paper

presented at the meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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Number agreement in sentence production. Psychological Review.

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grammar. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Thornton, R., & MacDonald, M. C. (2003). Plausibility and grammatical agreement.

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Author Note

Supported in part by a predoctoral fellowship to the first author from the National

Science Foundation and by research and training grants from the National Science

Foundation (BCS 02-14270) and the National Institutes of Health (R01 MH66089, T32

MH14257). We thank Lisa Octigan, Karin Humphreys, and Michael Diaz for their

assistance.


Table 1

Sample preamble set with mean ratings of sensibility, imageability, and notional number

for each preamble condition and the 95% Scheffé confidence intervals for the difference

between two means

Ratings

Sample preamble set

Head noun

Local noun

Sensibility

Imageability

Notional

number

The candle for the ceremony singular count singular 4.07 4.98 0.17

The firewood for the ceremony mass singular 3.94 5.01 0.45

The fireworks for the ceremony pluralia tantum singular 3.84 4.95 0.67

The candles for the ceremony plural count singular 4.00 5.11 0.81

The candle for the ceremonies singular count plural 4.00 5.07 0.20

The firewood for the ceremonies mass plural 3.91 5.07 0.44

The fireworks for the ceremonies pluralia tantum plural 3.83 4.93 0.67

The candles for the ceremonies plural count plural 4.05 5.05 0.83

Range of ratings

95% Scheffe confidence interval

3.84-4.07

0.26

4.93-5.11

0.31

.17-.83

0.09


Table 2

Percentages of singular, plural, uninflected, and miscellaneous responses as a function of

head noun type and local noun number

Head Type Response Type Local Noun Number

Singular Count Plural Count

Singular Count singular 76% (293) 67% (258)

plural 0% (1) 7% (25)

uninflected 22% (86) 20% (76)


Mass singular 73% (279) 66% (255)

plural 3% (13) 11% (44)

uninflected 22% (84) 18% (69)


Pluralia Tantum singular 3% (11) 2% (9)

plural 73% (281) 78% (301)

uninflected 18% (71) 14% (55)


Plural Count singular 1% (4) 1% (5)

plural 78% (299) 77% (295)

uninflected 17% (64) 17% (66)



Figure Captions

Figure 1. Proportions of plural-agreeing verbs produced with four types of subject noun

phrases (collapsed across local number) and notional plurality ratings of the same phrases

Figure 2. Probabilities of conventionally grammatical (upper panel) and ungrammatical

(lower panel) agreement as a function of deviation between notional and grammatical

number for grammatically congruent (grammatical and notional number converge) and

grammatically incongruent (grammatical and notional number diverge) subjects


Appendix

Preamble sets used in the experiment.

The antique in the museum exhibit

The antiques in the museum exhibit

The ruins in the museum exhibit

The debris in the museum exhibit

The antique in the museum exhibits

The antiques in the museum exhibits

The ruins in the museum exhibits

The debris in the museum exhibits

The product outside the store window

The products outside the store window

The goods outside the store window

The food outside the store window

The product outside the store windows

The products outside the store windows

The goods outside the store windows

The food outside the store windows

The candle for the ceremony

The candles for the ceremony

The fireworks for the ceremony

The firewood for the ceremony

The candle for the ceremonies

The candles for the ceremonies

The fireworks for the ceremonies

The firewood for the ceremonies

The nightgown across from the mannequin

The nightgowns across from the mannequin

The pajamas across from the mannequin

The lingerie across from the mannequin

The nightgown across from the mannequins

The nightgowns across from the mannequins

The pajamas across from the mannequins

The lingerie across from the mannequins

The necklace in front of the toothbrush

The necklaces in front of the toothbrush

The cosmetics in front of the toothbrush

The lipstick in front of the toothbrush

The necklace in front of the toothbrushes

The necklaces in front of the toothbrushes

The cosmetics in front of the toothbrushes

The lipstick in front of the toothbrushes

The festival after the sporting event

The festivals after the sporting event

The festivities after the sporting event

The entertainment after the sporting event

The festival after the sporting events

The festivals after the sporting events

The festivities after the sporting events

The entertainment after the sporting events

The tribute after the speech

The tributes after the speech

The thanks after the speech

The applause after the speech

The tribute after the speeches

The tributes after the speeches

The thanks after the speeches

The applause after the speeches

The vegetable underneath the bag

The vegetables underneath the bag

The groceries underneath the bag

The produce underneath the bag

The vegetable underneath the bags

The vegetables underneath the bags

The groceries underneath the bags

The produce underneath the bags

The prize from the lottery

The prizes from the lottery

The winnings from the lottery

The revenue from the lottery

The prize from the lotteries

The prizes from the lotteries

The winnings from the lotteries

The revenue from the lotteries

The wave against the kayak

The waves against the kayak

The rapids against the kayak

The rain against the kayak

The wave against the kayaks

The waves against the kayaks

The rapids against the kayaks

The rain against the kayaks


The cherry near the large potato

The cherries near the large potato

The chives near the large potato

The corn near the large potato

The cherry near the large potatoes

The cherries near the large potatoes

The chives near the large potatoes

The corn near the large potatoes

The rotten apple near the fork

The rotten apples near the fork

The rotten greens near the fork

The rotten fruit near the fork

The rotten apple near the forks

The rotten apples near the forks

The rotten greens near the forks

The rotten fruit near the forks

The suitcase next to the vending machine

The suitcases next to the vending machine

The belongings next to the vending machine

The baggage next to the vending machine

The suitcase next to the vending machines

The suitcases next to the vending machines

The belongings next to the vending

machines

The baggage next to the vending machines

The payment for the cleaning job

The payments for the cleaning job

The wages for the cleaning job

The pay for the cleaning job

The payment for the cleaning jobs

The payments for the cleaning jobs

The wages for the cleaning jobs

The pay for the cleaning jobs

The song with the nice harmony

The songs with the nice harmony

The lyrics with the nice harmony

The music with the nice harmony

The song with the nice harmonies

The songs with the nice harmonies

The lyrics with the nice harmonies

The music with the nice harmonies

The diamond behind the slip

The diamonds behind the slip

The valuables behind the slip

The jewelry behind the slip

The diamond behind the slips

The diamonds behind the slips

The valuables behind the slips

The jewelry behind the slips

The fee for the country club

The fees for the country club

The dues for the country club

The cash for the country club

The fee for the country clubs

The fees for the country clubs

The dues for the country clubs

The cash for the country clubs

The desert beyond the mountain

The deserts beyond the mountain

The waterfalls beyond the mountain

The tundra beyond the mountain

The desert beyond the mountains

The deserts beyond the mountains

The waterfalls beyond the mountains

The tundra beyond the mountains

The raise for the chef

The raises for the chef

The earnings for the chef

The money for the chef

The raise for the chefs

The raises for the chefs

The earnings for the chefs

The money for the chefs

The sweater on top of the old coat

The sweaters on top of the old coat

The clothes on top of the old coat

The clothing on top of the old coat

The sweater on top of the old coats

The sweaters on top of the old coats

The clothes on top of the old coats

The clothing on top of the old coats

The ball-game in the home video

The ball-games in the home video

The acrobatics in the home video

The karate in the home video

The ball-game in the home videos

The ball-games in the home videos

The acrobatics in the home videos

The karate in the home videos

The prescription for the infection


The prescriptions for the infection

The eyedrops for the infection

The medication for the infection

The prescription for the infections

The prescriptions for the infections

The eyedrops for the infections

The medication for the infections

The bowl beneath the portrait

The bowls beneath the portrait

The ceramics beneath the portrait

The pottery beneath the portrait

The bowl beneath the portraits

The bowls beneath the portraits

The ceramics beneath the portraits

The pottery beneath the portraits

The syringe under the cabinet

The syringes under the cabinet

The narcotics under the cabinet

The aspirin under the cabinet

The syringe under the cabinets

The syringes under the cabinets

The narcotics under the cabinets

The aspirin under the cabinets

The plate behind the wine glass

The plates behind the wine glass

The housewares behind the wine glass

The china behind the wine glass

The plate behind the wine glasses

The plates behind the wine glasses

The housewares behind the wine glasses

The china behind the wine glasses

The bubble on the sponge

The bubbles on the sponge

The suds on the sponge

The foam on the sponge

The bubble on the sponges

The bubbles on the sponges

The suds on the sponges

The foam on the sponges

The newly arrived soldier from the outer

territory

The newly arrived soldiers from the outer

territory

The newly arrived troops from the outer

territory

The newly arrived military from the outer

territory

The newly arrived soldier from the outer

territories

The newly arrived soldiers from the outer

territories

The newly arrived troops from the outer

territories

The newly arrived military from the outer

territories

The twig behind the large fallen tree

The twigs behind the large fallen tree

The woods behind the large fallen tree

The foliage behind the large fallen tree

The twig behind the large fallen trees

The twigs behind the large fallen trees

The woods behind the large fallen trees

The foliage behind the large fallen trees

The pea next to the egg

The peas next to the egg

The oats next to the egg

The popcorn next to the egg

The pea next to the eggs

The peas next to the eggs

The oats next to the eggs

The popcorn next to the eggs

The treasure of the pirate

The treasures of the pirate

The spoils of the pirate

The loot of the pirate

The treasure of the pirates

The treasures of the pirates

The spoils of the pirates

The loot of the pirates

The lollipop behind the child's present

The lollipops behind the child's present

The sweets behind the child's present

The candy behind the child's present

The lollipop behind the child's presents

The lollipops behind the child's presents

The sweets behind the child's presents

The candy behind the child's presents

The muffin alongside the bagel

The muffins alongside the bagel

The grits alongside the bagel

The cereal alongside the bagel


The muffin alongside the bagels

The muffins alongside the bagels

The grits alongside the bagels

The cereal alongside the bagels

Peculiar Plurals and Senseless Singulars: How Meaning-Full...

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