Plurals and possessives

Use the bound morpheme /S to indicate regular plural inflections, e.g., frog/s, tree/s. The /S is added to the noun stem without changing the spelling of the stem word, e.g., babies --> baby/s.

The plural bound morpheme is not used for those words which do not have singular forms, e.g., in the woods, tore his pants.

Do not mark irregular plurals, e.g., geese, two deer. This decision was made to simplify the transcription format. There are only a few irregular plurals in English so calculations of mean length of utterance and number of different words are not greatly affected.

Use the bound morpheme /Z to mark possession, e.g., the boy/z hat.

Do not mark possessive pronouns, e.g., his, hers, its, ours, yours, theirs.

Use the bound morpheme /S/Z to indicate both plurality and possession. The plural inflection comes first followed by the possessive inflection, e.g., the frog/s/z baby/s.