Number: number
| Values: | Sing | Plur |
In Spanish, Number is an inflectional feature of nouns , and other parts of speech (adjectives, auxiliaries, determiners, numerals, pronouns, verbs) that mark agreement with nouns.
Spanish distinguishes two Number values: singular, and plural. It’s important to note that in Spanish grammar, concordance or agreement is a critical concept. This means that adjectives, determiners, and pronouns must match the number (and gender) of the noun they refer to.
Sing: singular number
Singular number is used when the speaker wants to refer to one countable entity. It is the unmarked form of number in Spanish.
Examples
- El gato “The cat”
- Un libro “A book”
Plur: plural number
Examples
- Los gatos “The cats”
- Libros “Books”
In spoken Spanish, one of the dialectal distinctions is based on the elision, aspiration, or maintenance of the sound -s, which is the plural morpheme. This is particularly common in some regional accents, such as in parts of Andalusia and the Caribbean, where the final -s might be dropped. This phenomenon is often referred to as “s-aspiration” or “s-elision”.
However, if there is phonological transcription, the number can be inferred from the pronoun, determiner, or the context. Nevertheless, the words might still be tagged with the Number feature as it corresponds grammatically, regardless of the actual pronunciation.
Examples
- Lo’ coche’ [loˈko.tʃe] “The cars”
- Mi’ zapato’ [misaˈpa.to] “My shoes”
In the examples provided, the apostrophe indicates elision of the final -s in informal or regional speech. Despite this phonetic change, the words would still be tagged as plural in analysis due to their grammatical and contextual function.
Number in other languages: [arr] [bej] [bg] [bm] [cs] [cy] [el] [en] [es] [ess] [eu] [fi] [fr] [ga] [gn] [gub] [hbo] [hu] [hy] [it] [ka] [ky] [myv] [orv] [pcm] [pt] [qpm] [ru] [sl] [sv] [tpn] [tr] [tt] [u] [uk] [urb] [urj]