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Eagerlearner Posted 17 years ago
Linguistics Studies

The essence purpose of verb pluarality ?

Hello, let's be short and to the point.

"He loves many girls"

For the noun "girls" gives a meaning of many to the reader that they are many girls.

For the verb "loves", besides for grammatical purpose, what is the use of differentiating singular and plural verb ? like

"He loves"
"They love"

Why not always only have

"He love"
"They love"

Is it just a dummy convention/rule or is there a context that this differentiation is useful in denoting something meaningful (besides grammatical purpose) ?

Thanks,
William
  

Top answer

There used to be more inflected verb forms in English but they have slowly made their way out of the language. I don't think anyone knows why those inflections originally came to be used. From my viewpoint English is extremely simple as far as verb forms are concerned because in my mother tongue, Finnish, a verb has hundreds of different forms.

— Cool Breeze

  • There used to be more inflected verb forms in English but they have slowly made their way out of the language.
  • I don't think anyone knows why those inflections originally came to be used.
  • From my viewpoint English is extremely simple as far as verb forms are concerned because in my mother tongue, Finnish, a verb has hundreds of different forms.
  • CB
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3 Answers
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There used to be more inflected verb forms in English but they have slowly made their way out of the language. I don't think anyone knows whythose inflections originally came to be used. From my viewpoint English is extremely simple as far as verb forms are concerned because in my mother tongue, Finnish, a verb has hundreds of different forms.
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Thank you Cool Breeze, now I am more certain that inflecitional verb is just a grammatical purpose.
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EagerlearnerThank you Cool Breeze, now I am more certain that inflecitional verb is just a grammatical purpose.

You're welcome. I think you're right. There are cases in which having lots of verb forms may help make the meaning clearer. Oddly enough, there's no difference between singular and plural verbs in Swedish, another Germanic language, which i
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