Abstract
This chapter investigates the correlation between the semantic and grammatical properties of N1s of collective origin in binominal “pseudopartitive” constructions, such as a swarm of helicopters or the last couple of weeks. The few existing studies diverge in their conclusions, from rejecting collective status for all metaphorical uses to rejecting only cases of obligatory plural agreement of the verb; one even considers all these uses collective. The present study, taking a constructionist approach to meaning, proposes that such divergences stem from a confusion between word level and construction level. The construction organises its own roles, including a strong quantificational value; at word level, a noun loses collective status only in the few cases in which it no longer contributes a /group/ feature, which is the feature that defines it as “collective” elsewhere in the language. This loss is found to occur only at stage 3 of a proposed Quantification Scale and to involve either semantic or syntactic reanalysis. For each stage, semantic characteristics are found to correlate with grammatical properties which, it is claimed, are the relevant ones to assess the semantic classification of nouns.
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Notes
- 1.
In French, property 2 is lost in very similar ways to English. See for instance une foule de problèmes se sont posés/*s’est posée (“a host of problems have/*has occurred”), un tas de gens sont/*est malheureux (“a load (lot) of people are/*is unhappy”).
- 2.
For Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 349), N1 remains the syntactic head, but becomes “number transparent”. Number transparency occurs when N1 is “transparent to verb agreement”; “the noun in the of-complement determines the agreement”, as a result of a form of “bleaching syntactic potency” of the head noun (Pullum 2015).
- 3.
Or “caused motion” interpretation, for Goldberg and Jackendoff (2004: 534).
- 4.
With deverbal nouns (e.g. meeting, destruction), of introduces either the semantic subject (a meeting of delegates: delegates met) or the semantic object (a destruction of cities: the enemy destroyed cities).
- 5.
The search was carried out in COCA, using the collocate search “[collective noun] of” (for instance, swarm of) + “N.PL” (i.e. any noun in the plural), which returns results in the form of a list of N2-s. I filtered each list manually to retain only metaphorical uses. The search includes cases in which there might be an adjective before N2-s, even though I did not check specifically as the aim was only to consider the Animacy Hierarchy. For the few words for which there was a metaphorical use with a single N2-s, and less than 5 occurrences of it (e.g. wardrobe of → accents, 1 occurrence only), I searched for the whole string (“wardrobe of accents” in this example) on Google Books and retained the result if there was at least 1 occurrence there as well. Further quantitative analyses with other corpora or datasets would be useful for more refined results.
- 6.
The nouns retained as “collective” in Gardelle (2019) are those that license the following glosses, either all the time (collective noun, e.g. committee) or in one of their senses (collective sense of a noun, e.g. wardrobe):
-
(a)
An X is/can be composed of units Ys
-
(b)
A unit Y can be part of an X
For example, a committee is composed of members, and a committee member can be part of a committee.
These tests exclude a number of NPs that have collective reference in a given discourse context, but whose head noun is not itself collective, such as metonymic Mozambican football in Mozambican football is in mourning. For a discussion of these criteria, see Gardelle (2019: 65).
The 175 words were obtained through a full-text search of the OED (2014 edition), using collective / collectively, as well as a set of / a bunch of, with one-by-one exclusion of many irrelevant results (e.g. accommodation ladder, defined as “a set of steps giving access from one deck to another, or used to board a ship”). Additionally, a few nouns cited in studies on collective nouns, but which the OED search had not brought out, were added if they passed tests a. and b. (for a discussion of difficulties with dictionary definitions in detecting collective nouns, see Gardelle (2019: 73)).
-
(a)
- 7.
Or rather, typically becomes obligatory: a pack of paparazzi, for instance, might well be referred to as the pack later on, if the metaphor is extended.
- 8.
This suppression-oriented mode of comprehension of metaphors has been formalized in psycholinguistics as a process of suppression (for instance by Gernsbacher and Robertson 1999), inhibition or filtering (Glucksberg et al. 2001). Banaruee et al. (2017: 4) further point out that metaphorical classes are created on the basis of a salient semantic feature, which makes them less feature-rich than the class denoted literally by the same noun. To them, it is this semantic feature, activated at an early stage of processing, that prevents activation of non-salient, metaphor-irrelevant features. The exact processing of metaphors still requires further research. In particular, Neveux (2013: 82, 146), working on metaphors in John Donne’s poetry, shows that metaphorical constructions typically rely on a synthetic assimilation of analytical traits, rather than a seme-by-seme analysis.
- 9.
This second stage might not be available to all N1s. For instance, no occurrences were found for archipelago (of prisons, clouds, casinos, businesses, etc.). A broader sample would be needed to ascertain this, however, as number can only be assessed when the binominal construction is in subject position and followed by a verb in the present or be in the preterite.
- 10.
Similarly, no instances of this, that or the could be found with a plural verb in metaphorical uses, for any of the collective nouns under study.
- 11.
A collective noun shows a double layer of conceptualization: a group, composed of members. When a property is ascribed, it typically concerns the group (e.g. a big committee gives the size of the group and does not say anything about the size of the individual members), but some collective nouns are more “permeable” (Joosten et al. 2007) than others, so that some properties may apply to the members (e.g. a young couple may mean a couple of young people, rather than a recently formed couple). Age/recency and size, however, are found by Gardelle (2019: 61) to be the two properties that resist transfer to the members: all collective nouns license at least one of them for the group, and not the members. These two properties provide a reliable test to distinguish between collective nouns and aggregate nouns (such as furniture: new furniture has to refer to new pieces of furniture and cannot mean a newly formed set) or plurals (e.g. the heirs shrank in size may not mean that the group shrank because some of the heirs died, as also noted by Acquaviva (2008: 104), but would have to mean that they drank some sort of potion that made each of them shrink). In the examples studied here, the fact that a bunch of people may not have predications of age ascribed to the members, whereas bunches of people allows it, leads me to place the two patterns at stages 2 and 3a, respectively.
- 12.
The same goes for French foule, for instance: compare une foule de touristes se pressait (stage 1, “a crowd of tourists was hurrying”) with une foule de touristes se pressaient (stage 2, “a crowd of tourists were hurrying”). An example of a noun with stage 3 uses is tas “heap(s)”, both in the singular and the plural (e.g. un tas / des tas de gens sont plus vieux qu’ils ne semblent, literally “a heap of / heaps of people are older than they seem”—the glosses are not acceptable in English but replacing with a lot of / lots of would provide equivalents).
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Gardelle, L. (2024). A Swarm of Helicopters, the Last Couple of Weeks: A Constructional Analysis of the Syntax/Semantics Interface for the Classification of N1 as “Collective” or “Quantificational”. In: Gardelle, L., Mignot, E., Neveux, J. (eds) Nouns and the Morphosyntax / Semantics Interface. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44561-3_8
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