Job Discussion Forums

11:59 · Posted: Sat Mar 29, 2008 8:00 am Post subject:

I can't agree with any of that. I don't think it makes much sense seeking 'semantic' or 'pragmatic' (or any other real world) reasons for such matters. After all, if such reasons existed then languages would not differ in such aspects.

I think such maters are just arbitrary, as tacitly agreed upon by speech communities. Both the police and the army are collections of individuals, for example, yet in British English we can say 'The police are coming' but not *'The police is coming', but we can say both 'The army are coming' and 'The army's coming'.

Lobster · Posted: Sat Mar 29, 2008 8:34 am Post subject:

It does make sense in the context of directing students to make correct choices when writing. The explanation and suggestions are from a well-known and reputable grammar reference. It may truly be that in a particular speech community, some nouns are not perceived as being collective nouns and are only considered plural, but I don't feel that it diminishes the usefulness of general guidelines. The confusion that exists among native speakers themselves indicates that tacit approval is often not sufficient. I would agree that '*The police is after you.' would not pass muster with a majority of native speakers. They perceive police to be a plural noun. The words that create the most difficulty in the area of collective nouns are:

army
audience
board
cabinet
class
committee
company
corporation�
council
department
faculty
family
firm
group
jury
majority
minority
navy
public
school
senate
society
team
troupe

Without the benefit of such guidelines, the teacher must resort to explanations such as "That's just the way it is."

11:59 · Posted: Sat Mar 29, 2008 9:19 am Post subject:

Again, I couldn't agree less. I teach undergraduate (BA & BSc) Linguistics at university here in HK and I for one quite often 'resort' to 'explanations' such 'That's just the way it is'. After all, at the end of the day students simply have to learn arbitrary lexical items and whether or not such items of vocabulary are, for example, singular or plural when it comes to subject/verb concord and whether or not they are countable etc., if there are nouns, and whether they are transitive, intransitive or ditransitive, if they are verbs, etc. Even closely related languages such as English and German show marked differences in such aspects. In quite the same way that students have to learn that an 'apple' is called an 'apple' and not a 'XYZ' they also have to learn certain aspects of grammar, especially certain morphosyntactic aspects. The alternative to saying that 'That is simply the way it is' appears to be to state that one language is right and another wrong, or one language is more logical than another. This seems a tad absurd to me.

Lobster · Posted: Sat Mar 29, 2008 10:13 am Post subject:

The "arbitrariness" of lexical items (e.g. why we call it an apple and not a xylophone) doesn't really correlate to grammar (e.g. why must the verb agree with the subject in number) within the context of the language itself. Of course, we are teaching different subjects and the approach and explanations must differ. At the very least, we can point to historical developments as the root of many structures and lexical items. If they are interested in etymology, they can pursue that to learn more about the language. There is very little in language that is truly inexplicable. Guidelines (or grammar "rules") allow us to deal with recurring structures rather than with an endless assortment of seemingly unrelated situations. Even "soft" rules such as 'i' before 'e' except after 'c' can help students in their studies.

I'm not sure how you arrived at

arioch36 · Joined: 21 Jan 2003 Posts: 3589

Surfdude

Lobster · Posted: Sat Mar 29, 2008 2:22 pm Post subject:

Well, let's look at that 'team' example a little more closely. Let's not gtet confused by the words 'team' (referring to a single team) and 'teams' (referring to more than one team). The latter is plural, while the former is collective (consisting of many members). How would you feel about *The team showers, changes clothes and heads to its air-conditioned homes. ? Everything seems ok until you hit ' its air-conditioned homes'. While we can imagine the team members showering and changing clothes as a group, we can't imagine that they'd all live in the same home, therefore we view them as acting individually and consider 'team' to be plural here.

Now consider this sentence: Three organizations are responsible for public order; the police is one, the army is another, and the third is the sheriff's department. Does this strike you as incorrect? Probably not, as we refer to the police as a whole organization, rather than as a number of individuals. Make the verbs plural and it sounds whack. Although we may say "Three police were killed." it wouldn't be correct, as collectives shouldn't be preceded by numbers. Of course, "One police were killed." makes this immediately apparent.

Although "I am going to hospital." doesn't sound correct in my dialect, I realize that 'to' can be either a preposition or part of the infinitive form. That's why "I'm going to City Hall." is acceptable.

It's quite common to refer to national sports teams by simply using the name of the country. In this case, either the singular or the plural may be used:

England was ahead 3-0 at half time.
England have lost many players to injuries this season.

Re: 'class'

Your example doesn't illustrate the collective noun. Here the teaching is performed by one person on one or a number of groups.

But:

The class is working on its project. (one project)
The class are working on their projects. (many projects)

Now, you may choose to agree or disagree. I'm not making this stuff up or giving my personal opinion. My reference is the COBUILD grammar reference.

RED

arioch36 · Joined: 21 Jan 2003 Posts: 3589

There can only be one right answer!
What are you a brit? I know you are red!
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic.php?t=2251&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15

Lobster · Posted: Sat Mar 29, 2008 3:28 pm Post subject:

Sure there's one right answer - mine! I am not a Brit, but one of the hapless 30 million caught in the US-British vise, a poor Canuck. Those who deny the very existence of the collective noun will surely suffer collective punishment and feel collective guilt.

Individually, of course.

RED

Lorean · Joined: 21 Dec 2006 Posts: 476 Location: Beijing

Spoken speech must be transmitted through a chaotic and unreliable medium. So some amount of redundant information or checks need to be built into the language to ensure reliable communication.

This fact is often overlooked by linguists.

Although transmission through an unreliable medium is a problem well explored in applied computer science.

http://www.answers.com/checksum?cat=technology