Dictionary of English Plural Noun Usage

Author: Bo Bing
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-03-01
Features: Plural nouns in English often, like other difficulties such as articles, prepositions, verb tenses, etc., pose significant challenges to Chinese English learners. The main reasons for this are two: first, Chinese itself basically lacks plural nouns, and second, various English dictionaries generally neglect the usage of plural nouns, lacking sufficient examples on how to use them. This dictionary collects a large number of common plural nouns that are often considered difficult for Chinese students to use. It does not include plural nouns with simple usage or generally old-fashioned ones. Certain plural nouns denoting clothing, tools, diseases, games, etc. (i.e., those without singular forms), this dictionary categorizes plural nouns into three types:
1. Plural-only, no singular
2. Commonly used plural (including "often" and "usually"), with singular
3. Plural-optional, with singular
This dictionary also includes two types of nouns with plural forms:
1. Homonymous nouns (singular and plural forms are identical), such as sheep, scum, etc.
2. Plural-only collective nouns
Regarding countability, this dictionary uniformly handles it from a syntactic perspective. Therefore, many plural nouns that should be labeled "countable" from a lexical perspective are marked as "countable or uncountable" in this dictionary, because they may be "countable or uncountable" according to syntax. As for number concepts, this dictionary follows the explanations on number concepts in my own work, The Number of English Nouns. (Detailed explanations on countability and number concepts can be found in the special article after the preface.)
Most of the example sentences in this dictionary are extracted from English books, journals, and authoritative large-scale English dictionaries. Their translations are purely for comprehension and thus mostly use literal translation methods.