Suppose you had come across some linguistic utterances in which the following sayings were based:
were planned the presences the Municipal Health Secretary and the current vice-leader of the state championship.
have been confirmed the deaths of the former basketball player and the current volleyball champion.
They are planned the turns the sister who is abroad and the aunt who lives in São Paulo.
It should be noted that the nouns that are now highlighted are classified, according to the grammatical category, as abstract, that is, those in which there is a need for another person to really exist, really if effective. In this way, we feel questioned: even though they are inflected (spelled in the plural), would such an occurrence be adequate to the formal pattern of language?
In this case, it is worth stating that no, given that we are referring to this modality (abstract noun), the use of the plural is not accepted. Thus, depending on what the grammatical assumptions postulate, we apply the necessary correction to the statements:
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was planned the presence the Municipal Health Secretary and the current vice-leader of the state championship.
has been confirmed the death of the former basketball player and the current volleyball champion.
It is expected around the sister who is abroad and the aunt who lives in São Paulo.
A similar fact occurs with the cases related to the property referring to two or more subjects, given that the singular has a distributive value there, as it happens when someone says that "several employees will lose their jobs", when it would be convenient to leave the noun singular, that is: several employees will lose their job.
Since we are talking about nouns, we could not fail to mention those that refer to parts of the human body, which generally represent the target of intense discussions about flexion or do not. Therefore, we invite you, dear user, to access the text “Inflection of nouns referring to body parts”.
By Vânia Duarte
Graduated in Letters
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
DUARTE, Vânia Maria do Nascimento. "Inappropriate plural"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/gramatica/plural-indevido.htm. Accessed on June 28, 2021.
