Thursday, March 28, 2013

grammatical number - When to use the plural of "nature"?



Someone told me that the word nature should not be plural in my sentence. I would argue, however, that it is obvious that it requires an "s". The problematic sentence is as follow:




We must exploit constraints of different natures (temporal, logical, etc.) [...]




If I replace the word nature by type, type would be plural. However, if I am correct, the word nature is a case similar to the word information. In French, I would put an s to the word information in this sentence:





There is a lot of information to process




Can someone help me clarify this? Is there a simple and general rule for the words like information and nature? When must they be plural?


Answer



Singletons -- things of which there are only one -- are not usually pluralized.



If you were using nature in the sense of "the material world, excluding human activities" there is only one, and it could not be pluralized.




However your meaning is that of a "kind, sort, or character" which certainly can be pluralized.


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