2.215 PRODUCTIVE FEATURE

There are many nouns which refer to groups that can be used as partitives. They are linked by 'of' to plural nouns which indicate what the group consists of.

Here is a list of partitives referring to groups:

This use of partitives referring to groups is a productive featureof English because you can use any noun referring to a group of people or things in this way. For example, you can talk about 'an army of volunteers'. Productive features are explained in the Introduction.