Plurals

4 Key excerpts on "Plurals"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  Grammar

  A Linguists' Guide for Language Teachers

  • Tom Rankin, Melinda Whong(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  2.1 What Is Language? 47 third person pronouns, and a distinction between singular and plural in the pronoun system. This is not to say that all pronoun systems make a singular/plural distinction on all three person forms. It is likely that, as an English speaker, you will have sometimes found it neces- sary to clarify whether you means only the person you are speaking to, or a number of people. (And in some dialects, plural forms such as yous, and y’all are used for this purpose, reflecting a possible encoding of plurality in English.) It is also very common in languages from Italian to Japanese to Arabic for there to be no need to include a pronoun as the subject or object in a sentence at all if the context makes the referent clear. However, the point is that all languages have a system which allows for clear distinction of the person (or thing) being referred to without having to name the particular person or thing. And in your language classroom, your learners will have an in-built system for this distinction which has seen realisation in terms of the language(s) that they already speak. This may strike you as unremarkable, but it is a remarkable fact. Of the infinite array of meanings and functions that humans can express and understand, a few find grammatical expression in all languages (e.g. person, number). And while some meanings find specific mor- phological expression in some languages but not others (e.g. associa- tivity, dual and paucal, etc.; see Cases in Point), all languages are able to express these core meanings grammatically. The shared possibili- ties are what we refer to as a Virtual Grammar. Given the sheer range of linguistic variation that is possible, it is striking when certain grammatical concepts or features are universally expressed in all languages; this tells us something about the underlying nature of Language. One fundamental defining feature of all languages is that of hierarchical structure dependence.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Verbal Plurality and Distributivity

  • Patricia Cabredo Hofherr, Brenda Laca, Patricia Cabredo Hofherr, Brenda Laca(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  b. Semantics. An essentially independent interest in pluractionals has been shown by people working in the field of semantics, some of whom are schol-ars whose work fits into a traditional linguistic framework while others are theoretical linguists and philosophers dealing with questions of formal se-mantics. The starting point here is undoubtedly Peter Lasersohn's influential book Plurality, Conjunction, and Events (1995), which includes a full chapter on pluractionals. His approach is reflected in and continued by such scholars as Zimmermann (2003), Matthewson (2004), and van Geenhoven (2004, 2005). The impact of the pluractional concept on semantics is shown by the many works with the term “pluractional” in the title that have appeared over the past decade. Examples include: “On distributivity and pluractionality“ (Matthewson 2000), “Pluractional quantifiers: The occasional -construction in English and German“ (Zimmermann 2000), “ Progressives, pluractionals, and the domains of aspect” (Laca 2004), “Pluractional adverbials” ( Beck & Ste-chow 2007), “ The semantic typology of pluractionality” (Wood 2007), “Plu-ractionality in Romanian event nominalizations” ( Iordachioaia & Soare 2007 ), and “Event internal pluractional verbs in some Romance lan-guages” (Tovena & Kihm 2008). A consequence of treating pluractional as a semantic concept is that one now finds the term being used to describe such languages as English, German, French, Italian, Romanian, Slavic, Hindi, Turkish, and Finnish, which do not have morphological pluractionals as tradi-tionally conceived, but which do manifest pluractionality in a broader sense. 3. Substantive generalizations regarding pluractionals 3.1. Widespread Pluractionals are widely found as a morphologically marked verbal category in the world's languages. They are not limited to specific areas or language families, although they predominate in some regions as opposed to others.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Slavic Languages

  Unity in Diversity

  • Edward Stankiewicz(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The relation between the singular and the plural is thus not merely one of a complete vs. underdifferentiated, defective set, but one of complementarity in which the singular allows maximal scope for the categories of gender and case, while the plural provides maximal range for distinctions of quantity. The capacity of the plural to split into several subcategories is implicit in the very nature of linguistic plurality which, unlike the idealized, mathematical concept of number, presents a variety of specific aspects which are largely connected with qualitative meanings. The diverse categories of the plural appear in the Slavic languages in a great variety of forms whose occurrence is delimited by the meaning of the given plurality and the grammatical categories with which they oc- 154 Slavic Languages cur. All these forms can be viewed, however, as the variant manifesta-tions of two quantitative oppositions which are utilized to a greater or lesser extent in all Slavic languages. These oppositions involve: (1) an indefinite quantity (to be called the simple plural ) which is op-posed to a finite or definite quantity whose number is specified by a nu-merical or adverbial quantifier (the so-called counted plural ), and (2) an indefinite quantity which implies a sum of constituents and which is opposed to quantity viewed as an undifferentiated or cohesive whole, or, in Cassirer's terms, a quantity whose parts are equivalents of the whole (the so-called collective plural). 2 It should be clear that the first term of the two oppositions constitutes the semantically unspecified, unmarked category of quantity inasmuch as the simple plural can contextually refer to a finite quantity (such as the planets, the Gospels, or the cardinal sins), or to an integral whole such as the scissors, the breeches, the tongs). The use of a quantifier converts any indefinite plurality into a count-ed plural.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Word-Formation in the World's Languages

  A Typological Survey

  • Pavol Štekauer, Salvador Valera, Lívia Kőrtvélyessy(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  When simple plural, as in prototypical inflectional paradigms, is compared with various meanings of plurality, a substantial difference between plural and plurality follows from the inclusion in the latter of additional semantic information represented by categories like collectivity, discontinuity, distribution, iterativity, quantitativeness, simultaneity, totality, etc. 14 The word-formation meaning of plurality thus follows from the addi- tional semantic content added to the simple concept of ‘more than one item or action’ by the various plurality categories, as shown in Table 1.1: Table 1.1. A range of semantic categories within plurality (27) Collectivity ‘more than one + holistic perception of substance’ West Greenlandic inu-aluit person-col ‘group of people’ (Fortescue 1984: 317) (28) Discontinuity 15 ‘more than one + irregular frequency of action’ Hungarian ki~ki-néz dis~look-out ‘look out from time to time’ 13 Thus, the syntactic context that determines the selection between the singulative noun sivienn ‘strawberry’ and the collective sivi ‘strawberries’ likewise determines the selection between the singular noun potr ‘boy’ and the plural form potred ‘boys’ (Stump 2005: 63). 14 Finer semantic distinctions are also possible: within the category of iterativity, E.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book