Singulative number

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In linguistics, singulative number and collective number (abbreviated SGV and COL) are terms used when the grammatical number for multiple items is the unmarked form of a noun, and the noun is specially marked to indicate a single item.

This is the opposite of the more common singular–plural pattern, where a noun is unmarked when it represents one item, and is marked to represent more than one item.

In some cases, a further distinction is made between the collective and what is known in some terminologies as the plurative, the former referencing multiple items as a class, the latter referencing them as individual units.

Greenberg's linguistic universal #35 states that no language is purely singulative-collective in the sense that plural is always the null morpheme and singular is not.^[1]