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12.3Possession - plural nouns

TYPICAL ERROR The competitors names are on the noticeboard.

CORRECTION The competitors' names are on the noticeboard.

EXPLANATION Nouns name things. Singular nouns refer to a single thing (for example, competitor refers to a single competitor). Plural nouns refer to more than one thing (for example, the word competitors refers to more than one competitor).

Notice that English is different from some other languages in that the noun itself shows whether we are talking about one thing or more than one. Some languages use a modifier, so they might use a phrase such as 'all the girl' (i.e. girl, not girls, assuming that 'all' tells us that we are talking about several girls). In English, we adjust the noun itself, so we would say, 'All the girls'.

In English, there are quite a few different ways that nouns can be made plural. To understand how to indicate that these nouns possess something, we must first understand the ways in which nouns are made plural. Much of the confusion about using apostrophes to show possession is actually caused because people are confused about the different ways we can make nouns plural. Once we know how to make a word plural, putting the apostrophe in the right place is easy.

We will focus here on the four main ways of making nouns plural.

The most common way of making a singular noun plural is by adding an s. Thus, competitor becomes competitors, house becomes houses, shoe becomes shoes.

Sometimes, however, a singular noun already ends in s or another sibilant sound such as ch (as in class, gas, beach, Jones) so we can't just add s to make it plural. For these nouns, we add es. So class becomes classes, gas becomes gases, beach becomes beaches and the family name Jones becomes Joneses.

We also add es to words ending in y in order to make them plural. However, in these cases, we change the y to an i before adding the es. Thus, the singular lady becomes ladies, puppy becomes puppies.

Finally, there are also cases where we make nouns plural by transforming the (internal) structure of the word, for example, by changing the vowel. Thus man becomes men, woman becomes women, mouse becomes mice and person transforms to people.

To summarise, there are four main ways of making words plural, as in these examples:

competitor becomes competitors
class becomes classes
lady becomes ladies
woman becomes women

Now that we know how to make nouns plural, we have a chance of putting the apostrophes in the correct place to show possession. It really is quite easy. For the first three categories, we just add an apostrophe at the end of the plural word, like this:

Singular	Plural	Possessive
a competitor	two competitors	the competitors' shirts
a class	two classes	the classes' teachers
a lady	two ladies	the ladies' voices

To show possession for nouns in the fourth category (where the internal structure of the noun is changed to form the plural), we do the same thing for the plural as we do for the singular form: we add 's. Thus, we say a woman's voice and the women's voices. There is no confusion doing this because the singular and plural nouns are slightly different.

Write the plural of each of these words.

agirl

bbaby

clily

dcicada

eworkman

fgoose

gFernandes

hfox

iparty

jWilliams