Dictionary of English Plural Noun Usage. Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press

Author: Bo Bing
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2001-08-01
Features: Plural nouns in English often, like other difficulties such as articles, prepositions, and verb tenses, 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 relatively difficult for Chinese students to use. It does not include plural nouns with simple usage or generally obsolete 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. Common plural (including "often" and "usually"), with singular; 3. Optional plural, with singular. This dictionary also includes two types of nouns with plural forms: 1. Homonymous nouns (i.e., 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" according to lexical criteria are marked as "countable or uncountable" in this dictionary, because they may be "countable or uncountable" according to syntactic rules. As for the concept of number, this dictionary uniformly follows the explanations on number concepts in my book "The Number of English Nouns" (Details 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.