A cat is an animal if and only if cats are animals, so both sentences can be used interchangeably. The plural without -s, i.e. The it being singular wants to point to a specific singular "thing" in the first clause but there are only plurals in there so it doesn't really work, though nobody will have a problem understanding what you mean anyway. This helps put grammar rules into real-life conversation practice and will make it much easier to remember. A couple of well-known sayings about dogs are examples of this: Although referring to "a dog" and "a man", this idiom suggests that all dogs are good companions for people. Would you ever say "eat pig" instead of "eat pork"? (2011). Unless the context indicates otherwise, use of the plural form of a word includes the singular and use of the singular form of the word includes the plural. Other people have no dogs. What Is a Plural Noun? Purely logically, "A cat is an animal" could be interpreted as existential (", @SyedDanishAnwar To nitpick: the singular/plural number does not attach to the whole clause, just to the pronoun. These are very rare. by English Links - Study Abroad - Learning English Video Project Animals: Same Singular and Plural Quiz - By ryry97 - Sporcle moose: Moose actually belong to the deer family. Again, "a dog" represents all dogs. This is most common in the names of fields of study: for example, physics, mathematics, ethics, and aesthetics. Other examples include news, measles, and billiards., Singular in construction means that these words have singular subject-verb agreement. But "Presidents are going to be in Nebraska next week" definitely implies more than one. Now we know that all cats are animals, and interpret "a cat is an animal" as meaning the same thing - i.e. offspring: The fox gave birth to ve offspring. All rights reserved. On the Zero Plural of Some Animal Names | Semantic Scholar English is, thankfully, not a very irregular language when it comes to nouns. There actually is a difference. Compare your paper to billions of pages and articles with Scribbrs Turnitin-powered plagiarism checker. It would be pretty rare to actually ask this about "cats" as that is a very common word. One reason is that these words are often used as mass nouns, which means that they refer to a substance or material rather than a specific object.

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