Hello again,
Sorry I've been posting so sporadically. As you all know, Thanksgiving was not too long ago, Christmas is coming up, we are in the midst of Hanukkah, Christmas is rapidly approaching, and, as fewer of you know, my birthday was yesterday. Not to mention finals are just around the corner (or more like right now). I don't mean to make excuses, but, suffice to say, I have had a very busy past few weeks and have had little-to-no time to post. So, here we go.
This post is about when to pluralize and when not to. What I mean by this is, how you know when a sentence's subject is plural and when it is singular. More precisely, this is called subject-verb agreement. Of course, this seems like a self-evident part of grammar, but it can be surprisingly tricky. For example, "this cat, unlike the other cats, is very quiet." You can see emboldened are the subject and the verb. Although cats is also a part of the above sentence, it is not the subject, and thus the verb we use is is instead of are. Make sense?
We'll go over a few more examples. Pluralistic nouns are a major source of confusion in this grammatical region - words like "pox," for example. Pox is treated as a singular noun even though it has an x at the end, making it sound plural. Here's how you would use it in a sentence, "Chicken pox is such an awful illness." Another confusing piece of subject-verb agreement is portions/fractions. For example, "some meals at this restaurant are good," vs. "some cheese smells bad." In the first example, meals is plural, so we use are. In the second sentence, cheese is singular, so we use smells.
I hope this has helped you understand a very complicated part of grammar! I wasn't nearly as detailed as I could have been (finals, holidays, etc.), so here is a much more comprehensive site. Good luck, and I hope that you feel more confident in your grammatical skills! Happy holidays, talk to you after!
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/sv_agr.htm
