Editing Singulative number (section)

{{Short description|Grammatical number}}
{{Redirect-distinguish|Collective number|Collective numeral|Collective noun}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=April 2022}}
{{More citations needed|date=October 2017}}
{{Grammatical categories}}
In [[linguistics]], '''singulative number'''  and '''collective number''' ([[list of glossing abbreviations|abbreviated]] {{sc|'''sgv'''}} and {{sc|'''col'''}}) are terms used when the [[grammatical number]] for multiple items is the [[null morpheme|unmarked]] form of a noun, and the noun is specially marked to indicate a single item.

This is the opposite of the more common [[Grammatical number|singular]]–[[plural]] pattern, where a noun is unmarked when 
it represents one item, and is marked to represent more than one item.

In some cases, a further distinction is made between the collective and what is known in some terminologies as the '''plurative''', the former referencing multiple items as a class, the latter referencing them as individual units.

[[Greenberg's linguistic universals|Greenberg's linguistic universal]] #35 states that no language is purely singulative-collective in the sense that plural is always the null morpheme and singular is not.<ref>Joseph H. Greenberg. "Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements". In: Joseph H. Greenberg (ed.). 1963. Universals of Language. London: MIT Press, pp. 73-113. Via [https://web.archive.org/web/20110816152830/http://ling.kgw.tu-berlin.de/Korean/Artikel02/morphology.html Wayback Machine]. Accessed 2018-08-10.</ref>