<b>Forum for the discussion of Applied Linguistics </b>
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Stephen Jones
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by Stephen Jones » Sun Jan 11, 2004 9:12 pm
-----".If, for the sake of argument, we presuppose the existence of these three boxes, we'd find that the "both" box was the norm and the few others that keep coming up were the exception rather than the rule.
"----
Take a large dictionary such as the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, or Merriam Webster or the Cobuild. or the American Heritage, or the Longmans Dictionary of Contemporary English, and you will find that only about five percent of the words belong in the "both" box.
It's much later in Saudi than in London, yet alone in San Diego, so I'll leave you and Larry to do the experiment and post the results tomorrow

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Duncan Powrie
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by Duncan Powrie » Sun Jan 11, 2004 9:16 pm
Thanks for taking the irreverance well, lolwhite. Your point about "honour" is good, I guess there are almost as many forms/differing collocations as there are (required) meanings! Hmm I hope I didn't throw things off track a little by butting in earlier with partatives, but I was just wondering (and this is where Stepehen might come into his own), are partatives themselves easily categorizable according to countability? (That is, they are presumably all eminently countable in themselves). My intuiition tells me they are, but it's something I'd like to get straight in my mind (and will check myself) because it is kind of the "centrepiece" of my (limited) thinking about notions of quantity!
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Duncan Powrie on Fri Mar 19, 2004 1:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Stephen Jones
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by Stephen Jones » Sun Jan 11, 2004 9:21 pm
n that context, I would take "honour" to mean "something that reflects well on me", not the more abstract concept of "my/your/the family honour", so the singular article is quite properly used.
Yea, but "somethiing" is also uncountable. We don't have "two somethings", any more than we say "they are great honours". And to compound the confusion, we have the plural form also as an uncountable noun in the phrase "do the honours".
I think we take the language teacher's cop-out here, and call them idioms.
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Duncan Powrie
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by Duncan Powrie » Sun Jan 11, 2004 9:30 pm
I think lolwhite meant "something" to mean A/ONE thing...either way, some and a both are determiners, and there is a free choice between them irrespective of countability, verb agreement etc.
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Duncan Powrie
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by Duncan Powrie » Sun Jan 11, 2004 9:38 pm
oops I should say, a free choice between them in THIS particular instance ("a/someTHING...")...right?
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lolwhites
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by lolwhites » Sun Jan 11, 2004 9:48 pm
OK, maybe I should have said "some thing" or "an undefined thing". Apologies for my lack of clarity.
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Duncan Powrie
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by Duncan Powrie » Sun Jan 11, 2004 10:34 pm
Stephen, I guess part of the reason why dictionaries insist on marking nouns as countable or uncountable is as much to do with learner needs/expectations/demands as with there being any hard, fast or absolute rules...hopefully the learners will see these dictionary codes more as guidelines than rules (to paraphrase Captain Barbosa), and appreciate that native speakers especially may be inclined to play around and change the "rules" as they see fit (i.e. when necessary, according to the meaning needing to be conveyed).
I don't know how many nouns are capable of belonging to a "flexible" category, but regardless of how large or small it actually is, it does exist and its boundaries can hardly be fixed!
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Duncan Powrie on Sat Mar 20, 2004 3:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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revel
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by revel » Mon Jan 12, 2004 7:03 am
Good morning all!
I think this morning I have identified what has gotten my goat on this theme and, fortunately, it's not a very big deal.
Working with kids from 5 to 11, I find a lot of them use single words to communicate. They have all learned the colors, numbers, incredible animals they may well never see in their lifetimes except on PBS, but they don't make utterances beyond a few pre-learned sentences or questions.
In my first classes I do a demonstration. I leave the room and enter, saying "Hello!". Most of the students reply with a "hello" of their own and I feel that communication has taken place. Then, I leave the room again, entering with a happy "table!" on my lips. The students never respond. Through this demonstration, I explain to my kids that a word by itself might mean something but that without other words around it, it might not mean anything at all.
So, I'll have to jump onto the context or universe of discourse wagon here. I want to emphasize that such debates as this are important among us, but that in the classroom, the above demonstration has been much more to the point for me. Consequently, in teaching these famous countable, uncountable words we call nouns, I flee from all the subtleties that we have gotten into here and concentrate on them getting it and communicating it. No student always puts the "s" on 3rd person singular in the present all of the time, so if they flub up with the countable/uncountable thing, well, just have to correct them and get on with the class, hoping that each time we will have to correct them less.
peace,
revel.
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Duncan Powrie
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by Duncan Powrie » Mon Jan 12, 2004 7:32 am
Hiya revel! You say "a word by itself might mean something but that without other words around it, it might not mean anything at all." But determiners, plural -s etc do not cluster around nouns at random - surely there is something (call it contraints, grammar, logic, how we conceptualize the world (in English at least), whatever) in the nature of the noun itself that dictates (albeit subconsciously to native speakers) what exactly is permissible. Of course, I am not saying that this would all be obvious to a learner...but I would hope that looking for the regularities (does Sinclair call them "Productive Features" in the COBUILD Grammar) we could present learners with rules that are not only accurate but generative, and would heolp them make sense of the world in English, if not the system(s) of English itself!
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Duncan Powrie
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by Duncan Powrie » Mon Jan 12, 2004 7:48 am
Ah, perhaps you were meaning it is context which determines how words collocate, rather than any properties inherant in the words themselves? I am not sure many people would agree with that (if that is what you mean), not only because words themselves provide a linguistic context within which linguists (to greater or lesser degrees) can exercise their intuitions...maybe the whole point of using such intuitions is not to overlook contextual/sociolinguistic factors, but to marshall and align them with the more purely linguistic concerns which we as teachers need to shape into a coherant syllabus (as Richards says in his paper on present perfect in his
The Context of Language Teaching, even if we adopt more functional approaches, there are still pedagogical decisions to be made concerning the ordering of pre-existing (and remaining!) items, namely the grammatical/structural ones!).

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Duncan Powrie
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by Duncan Powrie » Mon Jan 12, 2004 8:14 am
Besides which, surely grammar is something that should help, rather than hinder communication if it is incorporated or introduced into a syllabus in a considered, principled way (and even if you don't agree it will help communication as far as students are concerned, it might be beneficial for teachers to consider it in their planning)!
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revel
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by revel » Mon Jan 12, 2004 8:16 am
Hey there!
I do tend to simplify and sometimes what I want to communicate is not on a par with what might want to be understood.
I naturally want to communicate structure, pattern, meaning, etc....to my students. I find these aspects of English as important (oh no! I've used the "i" word!) as pronunciation. My "table" example is to help students realize the importance of making "complete" sentences as wholes and not individual words as units. Naturally, so many times I have to resort to diagramming sentences or making charts or lists or generalizations. And I could not generalize in saying what are the points I have to do this with, since it may be any point that needs such aides.
I, like so many, studied with passion linguistic theories and such, but that was twenty years ago and my time has been much more devoted to class work and much of the vocabulary or wording I might have used when I was inmersed in the learning stage of my profession has kind of gotten shut up in a file in the back-left corner of my grey matter. Oh well, I know where you're all coming from!
peace,
revel.
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Duncan Powrie
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by Duncan Powrie » Mon Jan 12, 2004 8:53 am
Hey revel baby (they are nice choccies by the way), no worries with the terminology, I don't think any of us can claim (or would want) to use it with unerring precision, as long as what we say is pointing in the right general direction it serves its purpose (clarification/negotiation of meaning can come later...if people show the interest and courtesy to ask us for it in a polite and sincere way!). I suppose these tricky bits of grammar are things we can never quite pin down, and need to wrestle into one position or another throughout our careers...I am just hoping that I will be satisfied enough at some point to begin APPLYING what I've come up with, that is, to shape it into a form that students will (be able to) appreciate! Damn I am sounding all duck-billed platitudinous...
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LarryLatham
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by LarryLatham » Mon Jan 12, 2004 5:57 pm
Stephen says, quote:
"Now the last example here is interesting, because it appears to contradict what I said before about rice being uncountable. But wait; in the same restaurant we would ask for three fried chicken, though if we were really hungry we would ask for three fried chickens. Therefore it seems that the idea of ellipsis is strong here in "three fried rice" or "two braised whale". But wait again. There would be nothing wrong in ordering "two spaghettis" or "three macaronis" though the uncountable form would also be correct."
Now, don't you think it would be unremarkable if someone ordered "three fried rices"? Or, for that matter, "three fried chickens"? In the context of a restaurant, the waiter is not likely to assume that the customer meant to order three whole chickens if there are three people at the table. If it's a large party of, say, twenty people the waiter may rightly ask for confirmation as to whether the customer wants three portions of fried chicken or three whole chickens, since Chinese restaurants tend to serve food family style, where everyone at the table has access to all the food. The point is, I think, that your assertion that "rice" can NEVER be countable is too rigid. And telling your students that it is leads them to make some wrong conclusions.
Larry Latham
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Stephen Jones
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by Stephen Jones » Mon Jan 12, 2004 6:48 pm
I am pretty sure that a native English speaking waiter would say "three fried rice" without the 's'. You could then argue whether "rice" in this phrase is the plural of rice (like sheep is the plural of sheep) or an uncountable noun followed by a number.
Of course all this is moot because the odds of finding a waiter whose native language is English, is in the UK vanishingly small, and even smaller are the odds you would want to stay and wait to be served by him (or that he would ever bother to get round to serving you).
I would teach students to stick to fairly rigid rules when they are producing utterances, but not to be too surprised if they hear or read examples that don't appear to conform to the rule.
It would take a very adnvanced learner or English to produce this sentence: "There was a tiredness about him that a mere lack of sleep could not explain". If you tell the foreign student that "an air of mystery" shows air can be countable, then the next minute he'll be talking about "half-a-dozen airs of mystery".
I think the problem comes that you and lolwhites are concentrating on the examples of food and liquids where there is a lot of elasticity. And of course textbooks insist on using these as the context to teach countable and uncountable in. And it is something taught at a very early stage, where things have to be in black and white or students won't understand them.