collective (adj.)

A term used in GRAMMATICAL DESCRIPTION to refer to a NOUN which denotes a group of entities, and which is FORMALLY differentiated from other nouns by a distinct pattern of NUMBER contrast (and, in some languages, MORPHOLOGICALLY). Collective nouns (e.g. government, army, club, jury, public) fall into several grammatical subclasses, but their distinctive characteristic is their ability to co-occur in the singular with either a singular or a plural VERB, this correlating with a difference of interpretation – the noun being seen as a single collective entity, or as a collection of individual entities (cf. the committee is wrong v. the committee are wrong). In some languages, ‘collective’ (v. non-collective) refers to a type of plural formation in which a number of individuals is seen as forming a coherent set; for example, a plural SUFFIX A attached to house might express the notion of a ‘village’ (collective), whereas suffix B might refer to any random group of houses (non-collective). In SEMANTICS, the term is often used for PREDICATES or QUANTIFIERS which ascribe a property to a group as a whole, as opposed to the individual members of the group; it contrasts with DISTRIBUTIVE. For example, congregate is a collective predicate: The children congregated in the hallway means that the group as a whole congregated; an individual child cannot congregate.