in linguistics, noun phrases have grammatical number. plural is one kind of grammatical number. in english, plural noun phrases are counted as more or less than one (e.g., "32 degrees, no bananas", "0.5 liters", "1.2 grams", "two times", "three fish", "20 mothers"). in contrast, a singular noun phrase usually refers to something that you would count as one only (e.g., "one time", "a glass", "the sun", "my mother", "jennifer"). noun phrases that cannot be counted are also singular in english (e.g., "water", "the meat", "some space", etc.).