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Collective plural

Grammar
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A grammatical construction using plural pronouns or verbs to represent a group acting as a unified entity, often employed for rhetorical inclusivity.

Detailed Definition
Collective plural refers to a grammatical or rhetorical use of the plural form to denote a group acting as a unified entity (e.g., “we,” “they”) rather than as individuals; in poetry, this device fosters communal identity, shared experience, or political solidarity, appearing in protest chants, national epics, or choral odes where the collective voice transcends the personal, as in Langston Hughes’s “I, Too” (which shifts from “I” to implied “we”) or the inclusive “we” of Muriel Rukeyser’s documentary poems.
Example
Example in poetry:
“We” in Whitman’s “Song of Myself” includes reader and cosmos; Collective plural in protest poetry: “We march, we rise, we will not kneel”; In Audre Lorde: “We were never meant to survive” – plural as solidarity; Not “royal we”; used for communal identity; Contemporary: “We scroll, we numb, we forget.”
Additional Notes
Grammatical case indicating accompaniment or association. Marked by "with" in English. Related to: instrumental case, grammatical function in poetry.
Also Known As
Group plural collective number plural of assembly aggregate plural Assembly plural
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