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If I want to say something like "judging from her first and second marriages," should I or should I not pluralize "marriage"?
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I would use the singular: first (marriage) and second marriage.
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I would use the plural. Unless you're using "marriage" twice, in which case it's singular.
In my mind it's the same as using the plural conjugation for "my brother and I ARE going" because there's two things.
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Although I agree with Skippy, I would use the singular in actual speech because it sounds better (even if it isn't 100% correct), as if it were: "judging from her first-[marriage] and second- marriage,"
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I would definitely use the plural.
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Damn it, I didn't know :-)
Is it because the possessive is not repeated? If you add the second her... would you use the singular? I would.
Judging from her first and her second marriage(s)...
And I would have used the singular in the original example too, but I found out I was wrong. Maybe I should have read it as "Judging from her marriages, first and second", so the plural would make sense.
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No, I don't think repeating the possessive would have an effect: I would still say "her first and her second marriages" (even though the repeated possessive doesn't sound quite natural anyway). I would use "marriages" in the plural simply because it refers to more than one marriage. For example, contrast:
"her red and blue cars"
with
"her red and blue car"
I think the second one would be ungrammatical if you're trying to refer to two different cars.
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I'm afraid I learned it the wrong way then. I understand the example of the red and blue cars. The second refers to one car that is red and blue, but I think the first can actually have three meanings: 1)her cars that are red and blue (maybe striped) -- 2)her red cars and her blue cars -- 3)her red car and her blue car.
Does that make sense?
Also, I tried looking for examples on the net. I noticed some patterns... Would you agree on the following examples?
In the first and second rounds... (plural)
In the first and the second round... (singular)
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the correct answer is "judging from her first and second marriages"
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