Collective Nouns

LUCRARE DE

ABSOLVIRE

Coordonator științific

Conf. univ. dr. Ioan-Lucian Popa

Absolvent

Maricela Roșu

Bacău

2016

Collective Nouns

Coordonator științific

Conf. univ. dr. Ioan-Lucian Popa

Absolvent

Maricela Roșu

Bacău

2016

Declarație

[anonimizat], prin prezenta declar pe proprie răspundere că lucrarea de absolvire cu titlul Collective Nouns este rezultatul muncii mele de cercetare, este scrisă de mine și nu a mai fost prezentată niciodată parțial sau integral la o altă instituție de învățământ superior din România sau străinătate.

De asemenea, declar că toate sursele utilizate, inclusiv cele de pe Internet, sunt indicate de mine în lucrare, cu respectarea strictă a regulilor de evitare a plagiatului.

Bacău,

data

Absolvent

CONTENTS

ARGUMENT………………………………………………………………………………………… x

CHAPTER I. Morphology of nouns……………………………………………………………….. x

I. 1. Nouns-general considerations…………………………………………………………………. x

I. 2. Gender…………………………………… x

I. 3. Case……………………………………………………… x

I. 4. Number………………………………………………… x

CHAPTER II. Collective nouns………………………………………………….. x

II.1. Definition…………………………………………………………………x

II.2. Agreement……………X

II.2.1. Concord with collective nouns during the last centuries……………… X

II.2.2. Singular verb agreement………………………………………………. X

II.2.3. Plural verb agreement………………………………….. X

CHAPTER III. Testing collective nouns at different levels………………………………………………X

CONCLUSIONS……………………………………………………………………………………………..X BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………………….. X

ANNEX……………………………………………………………………………………………………..X

ARGUMENT

Within the vast and complex process of a foreign language acquisition and use, the area of Collective Nouns seems to be a small part on the class of Nouns. This is a wrong conception since many important grammarians like Magnus Levin, Thomas Berg, Christian Lehmannn etc. have explored this area and demonstrated that at least the agreement within a sentence is such an important thing.

As the title shows the aim of the present work is to investigate and explore upon Collective Nouns field and their agreement with other parts of speech on a sentence.

Our understanding of English language is often limited by our own language. But is seems that the conceptualisation of standard English depends also from the English dialects. It was demonstrated that the Agreement of collectives is an issue not only for foreign learners but also for native speakers of English as long as there are many factors that influence the subject- verb concord: English dialects( American English, Britain English), their usage during the last centuries, the social context, the way of expressing someone’s ideas(writing or speaking), the need to focus on a group as a unit or on its members.

In order to be able to discus about Collectives we should present some important aspects about nouns and the criteria that led us till the subclass of Collective Nouns in Chapter I. In Chapter II we’ll see that the phenomenon of agreement has attracted a great attention in recent years and we will focus on presenting the results obtained from the study of the below corpora:

Written material: The New York Times(NYT), The Independent(Ind), Sydney Morning Herald(SMH)

Audio material: The Longman Spoken American Corpus(LSAC), British National Corpus(BNC)

While investigating this theme it became clear that there are many patterns which may influence the number agreement and the field of collectives has a wired perspective of study. In order to apply the study of this field with the young children, I proposed some tests for different levels: primary, secondary and high school.

CHAPTER I. Morphology of nouns

I.1. Nouns-general considerations

In English language, words are categorized into eight parts of speech: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, interjections and prepositions.

A noun is “a word (other than a pronoun) used to identify any of a class of people, places, or things (common noun), or to name a particular one of these (proper noun).” Also we could say that “a noun is a name. The moment we name something that exist or does not exist, that name becomes a noun. A noun is the name of a person, place, thing, or an idea.” Taking in consideration this definition of the noun, we can distinguish two categories :

The concrete noun is the name of a place, thing, or person; it refers to something that we can see or touch.(garden, book, table)

The abstract noun is the name of a quality, idea or experience; it refers to something that we cannot see or touch( education, information)

We should also clarify here the meaning of some other specific terms that we may use regarding nous:

A compound noun is a noun constructed from different nouns that function as a single unit( toothpaste, rock star)

A noun phrase is a grammatical structure which contain a noun and one or more modifiers( a huge mahogany table)

A noun clause is a group of words at least a subject and a verb that function as a single entity ( The boy who saved her is my brother.)

Every noun has one or more meanings. After long debates during many centuries, linguistics and philosophers claimed that there are two types of nouns:

1. Prototypical nouns = individual concept: wolf, flower, stone

2. Polysemantic nouns = nouns that have a specific meaning only in a context. For example when you say bank you may think of:

• A financial institution e.g.: You have to go to the bank and change some money.

• A sloping raised land e.g.: There are a lot of frogs near that river bank.

• A row of similar things e.g.: The new engineer is verifying the bank of switches.

• A place that stores human organs/fluids e.g.: They went to the blood bank yesterday.

Larsen-Freeman described in 1997 three kinds of nouns’ properties: semantic (meaning), morphosyntactic (form), and discourse pragmatic (use) which reflect the three dimensions of grammar. These properties affect one another in significant ways and even if are difficult to tease apart they are logically distinct from one other like it is shown in Figure 1

Figure 1

All nouns have three interrelated properties: First, the basic meanings associated with a particular word are its SEMANTIC PROPERTIES. Second, the ways a word’s shape can be changed to express nuances of meaning, and the ways it fits into syntactic constructions can be called its MORPHOSYNTACTIC (MORPHOLOGICAL and SYNTACTIC) properties. Third, words have characteristic uses in communication. These can be called a word’s DISCOURSE PRAGMATIC PROPERTIES.

John Payne and Rodney Huddleston mentioned in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language that all nouns have some specific properties. These are:

Inflection- the majority of the nouns inflect for case and for number

Function- nouns function as head in noun phrases

Dependents- occur with : determiners( a dog, the door), pre modifiers ( strange people) and relative clauses(people who dance)

Although the potential number of semantically based subclasses of nouns is infinite, the human mind is finite. Therefore, there is a very strong tendency for human to make distinct structural categories , particular “areas” of semantic space .Such is the case with subclasses of nouns. In this section we will discuss some of the usage and meaning-based subclasses of nouns that are treated as distinct by the grammar of English.

The most general classification of nouns is made regarding their uses: common nouns which are used to indicate things of the same kind (dog, water, boy) and proper nouns which name a single object separating it from the other objects of the same kind ( London, Europe, July). It is highly recommended to specify the difference between a proper noun and a proper name: a proper noun is used as a head in a noun phrase which serves as a proper name. We can affirm that proper names are noun phrases in their primary use. The titles of written works, movies, TV programmes could be examples of proper names .It can be made a visible distinction between strong and weak proper names like it is shown below:

strong proper names: Angela, London(there is no determiner)

weak proper names: the USA, the Avon(definiteness is marked by the definite article the)

The common nouns are divided in three subclasses:

Individual nouns: their singular form expresses only one object (city, dog, tree)

Collective nouns: their singular form expresses a group of objects( team, band)

Names of matter: they name the substance which they are made( wool, milk, sugar)

Another distinction between nouns could be made regarding their ability of being counted or not:

A countable noun is a noun that we can combine it with a cardinal number( two gates, four eggs)

An uncountable noun is the noun that cannot be combined with a cardinal number ( milk, wool)

We will demonstrate in this chapter of our paper that the noun is a flexible part of speech as we will discuss about its gender, number and case even the inflectional property could be presented in a short table like the one designed below for both regular and irregular categories of nouns:

Table 1

I.2. Gender

In Grammar, gender means “each of the classes (typically masculine, feminine, neuter) of nouns and pronouns distinguished by the different inflections which they have and which they require in words syntactically associated with them. Grammatical gender is only very loosely associated with natural distinctions of sex.”

In English the gender is not a grammatical inflectional category like in French or German. Gender classes are differentiated mainly by their relation with pronouns like in the examples:

He is the person you spoke on the phone

She is the person you spoke on the phone.

Analysing the examples above we could say that in many cases the pronoun is the one that tells us if the reference is to male or female. Also, the pronoun it indicates a neuter gender.

In general there is no distinction between masculine, feminine and neuter in English nouns. However, gender is sometimes shown by different forms or different words

Different words:

Different forms:

Looking carefully to the tables above it can be easily observed that:

Masculine nouns are words used for men, boys or male animals

Feminine nouns are words used for women, girls or female animals

Neuter nouns are words used for inanimate things, animals whose sex we don't know and sometimes babies whose sex we don't know

These nouns are called single-gender nouns because there are words used to express only one single gender. But there are some nouns which can be used either for masculine of for feminine gender ,dual-gender nouns(teacher, parent, friend) and of course that we can establish its gender only in a context looking for the pronoun that refers to that subject. Also it could be identify another category of nouns, the triple-gender nous(baby, infant) – class that contains only a few words referring to young people without specification of sex.

I.3. Case

Case = “any of the various types to which a noun can belong, according to the work it does in a sentence, shown in some languages by a special word ending”.The case shows the syntactic function of a noun.

English language has four cases: Nominative, Accusative, Genitive and Dative but only one of them the Genitive is inflectional because only in Genitive the nouns change their form.

The Early Modern English have grouped the rest of the cases in one case and named it Common Case or Plain Case as the noun doesn’t change its form. This theory can be explained in three simple sentences:

It is easy to remark that the noun girl doesn’t change its form in these three cases and this is the main reason why grammarians have chosen to simplify the grammar category of cases.

The majority of grammarians considers that the Vocative Case is part of the Nominative Case and named it Nominative of Address. In the sentence <Girl, come here! > the noun girl is considered to be in the Nominative of Address and the marker of this case is the comma used between the subject and the predicate.

The Genitive is the only inflected case (changes the way it is spelled) and it shows possession. There are two types of constructions which characterize the Genitive Case:

The Saxon Genitive – which has two forms for singular and for plural nouns:

Singular- we add ‘s on the plain form of the noun

Mary’s dog

the ox’s ears

Dickens’s novels

The child’s book

Plural- we add only the ‘ for plural noun that end in –s and we add ‘s for plural nouns which don’t end in –s( irregular nouns)

We normally use the ’s with people, animals and it can also be used with places, organizations and companies (which suggest a group of people).

The Prepositional Genitive- used for nouns which don’t name beings. It is formed using the preposition of :

the leaves of the trees

the Gulf of Mexico

the 27th of June

These are the basic rules in English category of cases. Many grammarians developed and explained in detail each case but as this is not the subject of our paper we will go further with the presentation of the number grammatical category.

I. 4. Number

In grammar the term number is a name of a system that shows the difference between singular (one) and plural (more than one).This system applies mainly to nouns and noun phrases.

The singular number names only one object/being: horse, table, jay, flower, man and the plural designates two or more objects: horses, tables, jays, flowers, men.

It is very easy to observe that the majority of the examples above built their plural form by adding –s to their singular pattern. This means that the number together with the Genitive Case are relevant in the noun inflection.

Another grammatical area where number is very important is the agreement within the noun phrase: this child vs these children.

The third criteria that we should mention here is the agreement with the antecedent-pronoun: Your child painted his portrait vs Your children painted their portrait. The last grammatical field where number has a significant value and probably the most important function is the subject-verb agreement: The child is painting vs The children are painting.

As a general rule, the plural of the most countable nouns is formed by adding –s .

Pen-pens place-places

Hat-hats Table-tables

The nouns that end in –s, -x, -z, -ch, -zh will receive the –es suffixation to buid their plural form:

Class- classes ax- axes branch- braches

Chintz- chintzes dish- dishes beach- beaches

The nouns ending in –o

If final –o is preceded by a consonant , the plural is formed by adding –es

Potato-potatoes

Volcano-volcanoes

If final –o is preceded by a vocal, the plural is formed by adding –s

Embryo- embryos

Radio- radios

Nouns ending in –f or –fe; on their plural form f becomes v and it must be added -es

Knife-knives

Life-lives

Irregular nouns:

Man-men woman-women foot-feet tooth- teeth

Mouse-mice louse- lice goose- geese child- children

Ox- oxen

Exceptions from the rules above:

Some nouns have the same form for both singular and plural: sheep, deer, fish, salmon

Compound nouns

Compound nouns with a main subject- the main subject receives the –s: masterpieces, headaches, letters patent, brothers-in-law, class-fellows

Compound nouns without a main subject- the final word receives –s: forget-me-nots, grown-ups, merry-go-rounds

All these nouns may be used on their plural form along with a cardinal number. But, as we mentioned in the first part of this paper there are also uncountable nouns in English. There are a large number of nouns that cannot be counted. They are expressing abstract concepts like advice, information, justice, art or names of raw material or food: water, sugar, milk.

There is one more class of nouns when we discuss about its number and this is the class of the collective nouns .As this makes the subject of the present work it was especially left for analyzing it in a separate chapter.

CHAPTER II. Collective nouns

II.1. Definition

Some very simple definitions are purposed by important dictionaries for collective nouns:

a collective noun is a “ noun that describes a group of things or people as a unit<family> “

a collective noun is “a count noun that denotes a group of individuals (e.g. assembly, family, crew)”

Regarding this class of nouns, the collective ones, there are some important things that must be analyzed, things that we try to clarify on this chapter. The most important thing which characterizes these nouns is their agreement with the verb and first of all it must be seen how the agreement with the verb changed during the last centuries. It will also be presented important results of some recent researches made by important linguists like Magnus Levin, Henri Annala, Thomas Berg, Rodney Huddleston, John Payne, Otto Jespersen or Ingrid Rodrick Beiler.

There must be investigated as well some differences that occur between BrE and AmE in the are of agreement with the verb.

Before discussing anything else, it should be presented a classification of the collective nouns.

On his doctoral thesis, Magnus Levin classifies the collective nouns regarding their uses in three categories: “There are innumerable nouns referring to different groups of human beings (family, congregation, legion, commission) and quite a few denoting animals (flock, swarm), but collective nouns denoting groups of inanimate entities are more difficult to find.” . Now, it is easy to say that regarding the animacy (the quality of being alive) as a semantic property we can distinguish 3 classes of collective nouns:

human beings

non-humane animate

inanimate entities

Even examples of inanimate entities are more difficult to find, Jespersen used a lot two suggestive words to exemplify this class of nouns: library and forest.

Another special class of collective nouns is obtained by adding the definite article the to an adjective that describes a class or a group of people: the young, the rich, the hopeless, the blind. The most important difference between a collective noun and a collective adjective is that the noun can be used other with a singular or a plural verb while a collective adjective always requires a plural verb.

The homeless need more attention

The rich prefer luxury destinations.

In 2011, Thomas E. Payne makes an interesting distinction between collective nouns and collective plurals. He made many researches and realized that there is a small class of nouns formed by six words: people, cattle, swine, kine, fowl, and vermin which it shouldn’t be considered collective nouns. He sustains his opinion saying that these words “always trigger plural verb agreement when functioning as the subject of a clause”. Another argument that he pointed out is that the collective plurals exist at the same time with their regular plurals: persons, cows and pigs but the first ones are used when we want to emphasize a collection as a hole.

Jan Rijkhoff drew an analogy between mass nouns (water, sugar, milk) and collective nouns and said that both classes are homogeneous and have cumulative references. This property can be expressed by a mathematical formula:

∀X ⊆Z ∧ ∀Y⊆ Z→ X+Y⊆Z

This formula may be read as: if there is any X that is a part of a Z and any Y that is a part of the same Z, then also the sum between X and Y is part from Z. In other words, if we think that on a table we have a bowl sugar (Z) and we have dropped two crystals of sugar (X and Y) on the table, the sum of those two crystals of sugar is still sugar (Z). The same property can be identified on collectives: if there is a family let’s say the Lamberts, and Mrs. Lambert is the X of our formula and Mr. Lambert is the Y then Mrs. and Mr. together are the same family.

Another interesting thing that catches the attention of a rider is written by Persson in 1989 when he said that a collective noun involves three entities of classical drama: place, time and action. It is given as an example the word crowd to demonstrate that collectives depend of the features above. To conceive a crowd, some persons-entities with mobility- must be at the same time in the same place. But there are words which respect only one property and they are collectives as well. For example army doesn’t respect the tempo-spatial entity; it only indicates persons that have the same activity.

II. 2Agreement

How should be understood the agreement? The agreement is “the situation in which two words have the same grammatical form. For example, the words are singular or plural, masculine or feminine, etc.” A synonym for agreement frequently used by linguists is concord although Christian Lehmann said that it must be made an etymological distinguish between the terms.” An etymological analysis would lead us to consider agreement as a non-symmetrical relation (x agrees with y but not necessarily vice versa) and concord as a symmetrical relation(x and y concord with each other)”

After making references to many grammatical studies, Levin proposed a complex definition: “Agreement is the matching of at least one syntactic and/or semantic feature of one linguistic unit, the controller, on another, the target, so that there is a systematic covariance between a syntactic and/or semantic feature of the controller and a syntactic feature of the target.”

In 1909 Jespersen said that “there is in all languages and at all times a tendency to forget the fact that collectives are grammatically singular, and we often find plural constructions, partial or total”.It is an important linguist which says that Grammar rules impose a singular agreement in sentences. Nevertheless the traditional view argues that singular forms are used when a collective noun is thought of as a unit and plural forms are when the speaker or writer is thinking to its individual members.

The concord is an issue not only for the foreign learners but also for native users of English which face the problem of how to treat collective nouns as long as we may choose between singular and plural, influenced by the need to avoid ambiguity.

The subject-verb agreement in collective nouns impose some restrictions as only verbs in the indicative mood change their form so that can concord with the subject. There cannot exist subject-verb concord with modal auxiliaries, subjunctives, non-finite and imperative verbs because these classes of verbs aren’t subject to changes disregarding the variations of the subject on number and person. Furthermore, the grammatical agreement is relevant only in the present tense because is the only tense that inflect in number and person.

II.2.1.Concord with collective nouns during the last centuries

A diachronical perspective on the usage of collective nouns in United Kingdom “suggests that there has been a decrease in the use of plural agreement with collective nouns in BrE during the centuries. Liedtke (1910:180f) studied the development of usage between Old English and Early Modern English and found a peak in plural verb agreement in the 17th and 18th centuries. His material indicated that writers began to avoid the plural from the middle of the 19th century. Usage is thus considered to have become more grammatically correct. Dekeyser (1975:46f) also found a decrease in plural usage during the 19th century for both verbs and personal pronouns”

Also in the last years the difference between AmE and BrE in the area of concord with collective

nouns has been frequently discussed. The majority of the studies revealed that plural verbs are used more frequently in BrE than in AmE .Regarding the concord with plural personal pronouns it is frequent in both BrE and AmE.

In 1986 Algeo remarked that the social context is an important element which may influence the usage of singular or plural agreement and he gives as example the collective government. “The noun government should be commented on further. Algeo (1986:279) points out that there is a difference in reference in the case of the noun government between BrE and AmE. In BrE the noun refers to the Prime Minister and his/her ministers, while in AmE it refers to the Congress, the executive branch, the Federal judiciary and the civil servants. It is possible that these differences in reference influence agreement. Singular verb agreement is

strongly preferred in AmE and (in most genres) in BrE”. In order to be clearer I found very useful the examples given by Henri Annala:

“The government have voted and they have announced the decision.

The government has voted and it has announced the decision.”

Pronoun Agreement is also important for relative pronouns in English. Hundt demonstrated in 1997 that the relative pronoun which is mostly used with a singular verb, on the one hand, and who is mostly used with plural verb on the other hand. “As pointed out earlier, linguists seem to agree that relative which co-occurs with singular verbs and relative who co-occurs with plural verbs with collective nouns. However, the choice between which and who is not straightforward. Jacobsson (1970) discusses animacy and humanness as the factors behind the choice between who and which. Who referring to human beings and which referring to non-human entities is not found to be a sufficient distinction, because who is sometimes used to refer to animals.”

These results incidentally indicate a decrease in the use of which as a relative marker in both BrE and AmE. The distribution of verbs with relative pronouns indicates that it is reasonable to treat which as a singular form and who as a plural form when referring to collective nouns. The same thing was demonstrated by Magnus Levin in his doctoral thesis after studying the usage of “which” and “who” in five corpora: NYT, Ind, SMH, LSAC, BNC. Result are presented below in Table 6.

Table 6. Using singular and plural verb with “which” and “who”

Adapted from Levin(2001) pp.58

Regarding the use of the plural pronouns referring to collective nouns the researches showed that the plural pronouns are more common in BrE if the pronouns occur in the same clause as the antecedent, but the difference between the varieties disappears when the pronouns are placed in a following clause or sentence.

II.2.2Singular Verb Agreement

Even the traditional view holds that number agreement with collective nouns varies between the two dialects of English in discrete and predictable ways, AmE preferring singular agreement and BrE preferring plural, recent studies revealed that there seems to be a slight increase in singular verbal concord in BrE press texts.

In 2001 Magnus Levin did some researches and demonstrated that in AmE singular agreement matches 97 percent in writing and 91 percent in speech. The studies were made on nineteen collective nouns :army, association, audience, clergy, commission, committee, company, council, couple, crew, crowd, department, family, government, group, party, public, staff, team.

Table7

Adapted from Levin (2001) p. 165–169

The rate of singular agreement in both spoken and written BrE is lower than in AmE, and BrE has a greater internal variance of concord between writing and speech.

II.2.3Plural Verb Agreement

Analyzing the table above it is easy to remark that “plural verb agreement patterns predictably were the reverse of the patterns for singular verb agreement discussed above. According to Levin (2001), BrE plural agreement appeared in 23 percent of writing and 32 percent of speech, while AmE plural agreement occurred much more rarely at 3 percent in writing and 6 percent in speech.”

Something strange can be observed with five collectives: clergy, couple, crew, crowd and staff. They frequently took plural verbs in at least one written dialect, as illustrated in Table8.

Table 8

Adapted from Levin (2001) p. 165–169

The results presented above demonstrate that the affirmation which says that

“ BrE favors plural agreement and AmE singular agreement for collective nouns does hold some truth”

Finally , we should know that there are some methods which can help us to avoid concord mistakes :

• insert the word members collectives: committee members, family members,

• use different word: players instead of team, soldiers instead of army

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