in English. Common nouns can be further divided into count and non-count nouns. A count noun can take a number as its determiner (e.g., -20 degrees, zero calories, one cat, two bananas, 276 dollars). These nouns tend to designate individually identifiable entities, whereas a non-count noun designates a continuum or an undifferentiated mass (air, cheese, lots of gravel some water, enough heat). The count and non-count distinction also affects what other determiners can occur with the nouns: singular count nouns can occur with a but not some (e.g., a chair but not usually *some chair) while non-count nouns can occur with some but not a (e.g., some furniture but not *a furniture). Many common nouns have both count and non-count senses. For example, beer has a non-count sense in she was drinking beer but a count sense in she drank another beer. Morphology Inflectional A defining property of English nouns is their ability to inflect for number (i.e., singular or plural). In addition to number, English pronouns can inflect for case, a feature shared by some NPs (see discussion of case below) but not common nouns themselves. Common nouns Common nouns in English have little inflectional morphology, inflecting only for number. In modern English writing, the plural is usually formed with the –s morpheme, which can be realized phonetically as /s/, /z/, or /əz/. For example, the singular nouns cat, dog, and bush are pluralized as cats (s = /s/), dogs (s = /z/), and bushes (es = /əz/), respectively. Irregularly, English nouns are marked as plural in other ways, often inheriting the plural morphology of older forms of English or the languages that they are borrowed from. Plural forms from Old English resulted from vowel mutation (e.g., foot/feet), adding –en (e.g., ox/oxen), or making no change at all (e.g., this sheep/those sheep). English has also borrowed the plural forms of loanwords from various languages, such as Latin (e.g., stimulus/stimuli) and Greek (e.g., criterion/criteria). Some varieties of English use different methods of marking the plural, many of which fall into one of three patterns. First, the plural morpheme may be absent when another word already indicates that the noun is plural. In the clause two girl just left, for instance, speakers of some varieties would not use the plural morpheme on the noun girl because the determiner two already marks the noun phrase as plural. Dem, which is derived from