Three mistakes in one sentence

This is the first in a short series of posts about things I've noticed in my current book, The Leopard by Jo Nesbo. I'm reading the English translation by Don Bartlett, published by Vintage. It's originally written in Norwegian so some of the things I write about might be influenced by that, I suppose.

Here, Harry Hole, the main character, takes issue with his colleague's grammar. This is not just a quirk of Hole; the other things I'll be blogging about are similar grammatical observations from other characters in the book, so I can only assume Nesbo is the one who is a stickler for precision.

The second two mistakes are factual errors, or judgement differences, so I'll leave those aside. The first, though, is Harry claiming an agreement error. He thinks that the verb should be singular is rather than plural are, to agree with the clausal subject [punks shooting good policemen] rather than the closest noun, the plural policemen. This is a common error; I'm forever correcting it in essays. It's easy to do because there's a suitable noun just before the verb, and our brains have forgotten that the real subject was ages ago, and take the easy option of the closest noun.

He's absolutely right if the subject really is that clause. Why clauses should be singular and not plural, when they don't really seem to be the kinds of things that can be singular and plural, is an interesting question in itself. We might say that it's semantically a singular event, the event of shooting described in the clause. More plausibly, I would say, is that when something can't have number (it's 'underspecified') we default to the singular, which is the unmarked option in English (and in languages generally).

What if, though, the subject is punks? It could be. Then the subject still has a clause, but instead of it being a clausal subject describing an event [punks shooting good policemen], it's a noun punks with a relative clause modifying it: punks [who are shooting good policemen]. What about that, eh? Then we do want plural agreement on the verb and it should be are.

But here's a thing: we can replace the noun punks with a pronoun, which in this case would be they or them, as it's 3rd person plural, and look! It's totally bad with they no matter what form the verb takes, and it's only good with singular agreement when it's them.

*As far as they shooting good policemen is concerned
*As far as they shooting good policemen are concerned
*As far as them shooting good policemen are concerned
As far as them shooting good policemen is concerned

The lack of the option of nominative case (they) shows that this isn't a real subject of the gerund (or rather, that the 'subject' of a gerund is not the same as a normal clausal subject). If there was no modifying clause, we could use they, and then we'd have to use plural agreement: As far as they are concerned. So part of this pattern is actually an artefact of the fact that you can't have a modifying relative clause with a pronoun. Note that if we put back in the who are that I showed as understood earlier on, it is obligatorily plural agreement, and it also demonstrates very clearly that punks is outside the relative clause.

I really do think it could be either singular or plural, depending on the structure. Not that this matters, much, but it does show firstly that subtle distinctions can illustrate different underlying syntax, and secondly that it's not a good idea to be too nitpicky about grammar in case a linguistics blogger comes along and takes issue with your correction.

The gender of Brexit

A friend of mine recently drew my attention to this article about the gender of the word Brexit in various European languages. It notes that the word is masculine in French and German, but feminine in Italian. The Independent's version of the story points out that it's also masculine in Polish, Flemish, Catalan and Welsh.

Italian has a justification for making it feminine, in that the word it's based on, exit, is feminine when translated into Italian (uscita). This is a terrible justification, in my view, as it isn't the word uscita - it's the borrowed word exit, and there's no reason on earth why they should have the same gender. As someone in the comments noted, you can have two words for the same thing with different genders, and gives the example of das Auto (neuter) and der Wagen (masculine), both meaning 'car' in German. It's word that have genders, and exit is a different word from uscita. However, it's the Accademia della Crusca, Italy's language body, that has decreed this and they have fixed principles on the matter, so they must stick to them.

If a new word is similar to an existing one, then it'll tend to behave like that one. An invented verb like gling might have an irregular past tense glang, on analogy with sing. We might be tempted to pluralise POTUS (President of the United States) to POTI on analogy with other words ending in -us, like cactus.

If there isn't an easy parallel to draw, then I'd expect it to be masculine, as it is in the other languages mentioned. In Spanish and Italian, for instance, nouns end in -o or -a. This doesn't, so we have to just pick a gender. As the article says, most new words get masculine gender. This isn't, however, because 'Spain, being a Latin country, opts for male', as the Guardian lazily jokes. It's because whenever you have sets of things in grammar, there is a marked and an unmarked option. Consider number: we add something (usually -s in English) to show that a noun is plural, and without that, we assume it's singular. Singular is 'unmarked', plural is 'marked'. Consider positive and negative sentences: we have a word to show that the sentence is negative, but nothing to show that it's positive. Negative is 'unmarked', positive is 'unmarked'. The unmarked option is the default option.

When it comes to gender, masculine tends to be the unmarked option. If you have a group of friends in Spanish, then if they're all male, they're amigos. If they're all female, they're amigas. If they're mixed, then they're amigos (masculine). Now, whether this reflects a deeply sexist mindset, whether it has contributed over many generations to sexist thinking, or whether it's totally unrelated, probably remains an unsolved question. But it does mean that new words get masculine gender in most languages.

Welsh appears to be taking a very pragmatic approach to the matter: it's masculine because if it was feminine, it would have to have 'consonant mutation', which is when certain nouns change the sound they begin with under certain conditions. It's just easier to make it masculine.

Congratulations on being an alumni?

My final-year students are graduating today. They'll be graduands for the duration of the morning and afternoon, and by around 3.30pm they'll be graduates. I enjoy this use of Latin morphology: the -and ending comes from the Latin gerund and gerundives, which end in -andum or -andus/-anda/-andum respectively.

The gerund is a noun derived from a verb, so in English it would be something like Graduating is a reason to celebrate. The gerundive is an adjective, and it's translated as something like 'to be graduated' (or 'fit to be graduated' or 'ought to be graduated'). It's this gerundive sense that we use in English: they are the students who are (fit) to be graduated. (Notice that we're using an adjective to refer to a thing, as in 'the French'.)

It appears that we've knocked off the gender agreement ending (-us, -a, or -um) and this helps us out in English so that we don't have to worry about whether it's a male or female graduand. Incidentally, when we borrowed this word into English I'm pretty sure they'd have all been chaps so I don't think this was gender equality at work.

When the graduands morph into graduates, they also become alumni, another Latin word. It's plural, in that form, and pedants will have know that the singular is alumnus or alumna, depending on whether you're male or female. Again, this is a bit annoying for English speakers who don't really bother that much with gender other than pronouns, and even there we're not fully signed up to a gendered system (we make no distinction other than for singular humans that aren't me or you (he and she, in other words), and singular they is also available if we can't be bothered even with that).

Normal procedure when removing gender distinction is to go with the male for everyone: actors and actresses become actors, lady doctors become doctors, and so on. With alumni, we're taking to using the plural form for everyone. You're an alumni once you graduate. This ever so slightly grates on me but I am a good linguist and a descriptivist and do not go around correcting people. I don't know why we use the plural. We're familiar with this in words like cactus/cacti so we might have used alumnus as the singular; we just didn't. Perhaps it's because we use alumni in the plural way more often than the singular and, as it's not that common a word, that's the one that stuck.

Words-combining

German is famous for its compounds. I'm not sure this is fair, really, because as far as I can tell it just doesn't write the spaces (I'm being facetious - but there is a conceptual issue here). No matter. It is famous for them. I said to my first years the other day that while English can't have plurals within compounds (eg it's toothbrush, not teethbrush, even though it's a brush for your teeth), German can. And this is true: bookshelf in German is Bücherregal, literally booksshelf. But it's not that simple. This is language we're talking about, after all.

German and English can both have irregular plurals in compounds, as well as singulars. English can have teethmarks, for instance (although personally I would prefer toothmarks). But neither language can have regular plurals in compounds, so we have mice eater but not rats eater and Bücherregal but not Autosberg ('cars heap'). (Links go to articles testing this idea.) The difference is that German has many more irregular plurals: their default (=regular) plural is the -s suffix that I mentioned in my Euros post. All the others, which put together are way more common, are in effect irregular.

Euros and the emergency plural

I'm learning German - I don't think I said. It's quite fun, although you never learn much at an evening class because there are lots of people of mixed ability and you can't ask the teacher important linguistic questions because it's not fair to expect non-linguists to know the answer to such things.

Anyway today, we learnt about currencies and big numbers, among other things. Germany obviously uses the euro as its currency, which is Euro in German. I checked, and it's not pluralised. Languages vary on what they do with the plural, so in Spanish you have 1 euro and 10 euros, but in Italian you have 1 euro and 10 euro, not 10 euri (which just looks weird). I think the most interesting thing about this is the difference between British English, which is spoken in a country where the euro isn't used and pluralises it (10 euros), and Irish English, which is spoken in a country where it is used (so it's a much more frequent word) and doesn't pluralise it (10 euro). I don't know what Northern Ireland does - I'm sure someone will tell me. I remember noticing it when an Irish friend-of-a-friend and thinking it was funny to hear an English speaker do what I'm used to hearing in other languages.

German doesn't pluralise it, as I say. Nevertheless, my teacher today definitely said '10 euros' at one point. A slip of the tongue, no doubt, or perhaps it is pluralised in some non-standard variety that she is not teaching us. But either way, it's interesting for a morphology reason. Steven Pinker published a book in 1999, too early to mention the pluralisation of euro because it had only just been introduced. But he did talk about German plural suffixes. -s is 'by far the least common' of the several possibilities (-e, -er, -en, -s, or nothing), but it is the Notpluralendung, or 'emergency plural' (p.222). It's the one you pick if the word is new, or doesn't normally pluralise. That's why it turns up on foreign words or names, and, in this case, on Euro.

More on 'is' and 'are'

Consider the following two sentences, talking about prizes:

Two million pounds is paid out every day.
Two million pounds are paid out every day.

Both seem ok to me, actually, and I'm not sure which I'd be more likely to say. Because 'pounds' is grammatically plural, the plural agreement is fine, and because it's semantically one sum of money, the singular is also fine. But I do think there's a slight meaning difference. I think that perhaps the singular implies that there is just one prize, while the plural implies a multitude of prizes. But then perhaps I'm overthinking it.

Code-switching contrastive emphasis

I'm watching Salamander. It's a kind of political thriller, lots of running about, photocopying and suchlike. It's also Belgian, and the dialogue is mostly in Flemish. It's a bit complicated to explain the situation, because 'Flemish' is Dutch as spoken in Flanders, but then some varieties (eg West Flemish) can be considered separate languages, and Flemish is a cultural label as well, and... well. Anyway. They're speaking Flemish for most of the time. Every now and then, though, they switch into French, either for a single word, a few words, or some of the characters seem to use French as their preferred language so you get a whole conversation in it. You also sometimes get 'parallel talk', where one person in a dialogue uses Flemish and another uses French.

One such scene took place, in which a dialogue took place between about five people, one of whom was using French. He said 'We have to know who our enemy is', and a Flemish speaker replied 'enemIES', stressing the fact that there are more than one single enemy. This is contrastive stress, and is a nifty way of indicating that you're contrasting something you've said with something the other person either said or implied. The contrast can be lexical/semantic: I want BEANS (not cheese), or it can be grammatical, as you can see here, where singular is contrasted with plural. Normally you need to contrast two things that are similar in some way, like two nouns/foodstuffs/potato fillings.

What's special about this is that the two languages do plural in different ways. French adds an -s in the written language, going from ennemi to ennemis. But in fact, in speech, you won't usually hear that -s, and the only thing to tell you the difference is the 'determiner', an article, demonstrative, etc. In this case it was 'our', which in French is notre for singular and nos for plural. I didn't catch the exact word in Flemish but in Dutch it's vijand for 'enemy' and the plural is marked with an -en: vijanden. The possessive determiner stays the same, and in any case the Flemish speaker didn't repeat 'our'. So we had this:

A: (We have to know who is) notre ennemi. 

B: vijandEN.

The Flemish speaker contrasted a possessive determiner with a totally different morphosyntactic category, a plural inflection, because he was contrasting the feature [number], which is encoded on the determiner in French and the noun suffix in Flemish.

Tobaccos

I snapped this photo while I was in London recently, at the annual LAGB meeting. It's a newsagent just next to Russell Square tube station, and it offers, among other things, 'tobaccos'. 

'Tobaccos' is a word you won't hear much. You're far more likely to hear the singular, 'tobacco'. In fact, it's not quite right to call it the singular, because 'tobacco' doesn't usually refer to a single tobacco. It's a mass noun, and what that means is that it's a substance rather than individual things that can be counted (those things are called count nouns!). Water is a mass noun, as is rice, bread, tea, juice, gravel, and so on. Some mass nouns are physically uncountable, like water - it's one continuous thing, unseparable unless you're looking at the molecules. Others, like gravel, are composed of little bits you could count, but we don't refer to each one as 'a gravel' or 'a rice' (for rice, we have a separate word 'grain'). As I've mentioned before, 'pea' is now a count noun, but used to be a mass noun 'pease' before it was reanalysed as a plural, with each individual bit of pease being a pea.

So normally, you can't pluralise a mass noun because it's uncountable. You don't order some rices in a restaurant, for instance. However, there is one time when you can, and that's when it refers to types or instances of a thing. Let's take rice. I wouldn't ask for rices in a restaurant, but I might if I was a rice salesman wanting a wide selection of rices to sell - basmati, long grain, brown, etc. Then I could ask 'What rices do you have?'. Or beer: I might ask for 'two beers, please', and I mean two instances or servings of beer.

This makes me think that this shop might have a wide variety of tobaccos, from all over the tobacco-growing world. Alternatively, it might have been written by someone who didn't know that tobacco is a mass noun and pluralised it to mean 'tobacco products'. This would actually be a perfectly legitimate use of the plural, but we just happen not to use it to mean 'different types of tobacco products'.

Three type

I wrote the following phrase in my PhD thesis:

"the following three general types of component" 

It would also be acceptable to write 'components', in the plural. I don't know if there's a prescriptive rule on the matter but speakers seem to feel that both are OK. So I ended up with having 'types' in the plural and the type of thing I was talking about, 'components', in the singular, and that's the way it stands. I think it sounds more academic or formal that way, whereas perhaps I'd use the plural in speech. I don't know; I'd have to check. 

But I was tempted, just for a moment, to write this:

'the following three general type of component'

Here, 'type' is singular, and so is 'component'. In combination with 'three', indicating that I'm not talking about just one type of component, this is definitely not grammatical for me. Nevertheless, my little addled brain wanted to write it and really thought it was all right for the moment. I don't have a reason why, and maybe there isn't one because after a little consideration I dismissed it. Certainly, having 'general' intervening between the number and 'type' made it easier to do, and leaving it out makes the singular 'type' sound much worse.

But it is also true that singular/plural agreement with 'type' (and related words like 'kind') is hard.

(If you're interested, this Stack Exchange thread discusses it, and doesn't come to any conclusion other than that maybe the one with agreement where both are either singular or both are plural is more natural.)

Homo sapien

The name of the human species is Homo sapiens, which means literally 'thinking man' ('man' obviously used in this case with its meaning of 'person of unspecified gender', rather than 'male human').

It's a bit unsatisfactory that part of the name for the human species is a word that means 'human', and that that same word also refers to all other species in the genus, which most people probably wouldn't consider to be 'humans' but rather closely-related species (Neanderthals and so on). Usually, people mean 'modern human' when they use the word 'human'. Still.

So, thinking man. Homo sapiens. Ever heard the song Homosapien by Pete Shelley? Or the band Del tha Funkee Homo Sapien? Both, you'll notice, use the 'sapien' part without the final s. Why? Well, it's a pretty straightforward case of mistakenly analysing a singular ending in s as a plural. 

The same thing happened to give us peas: we had a substance, which we knew as pease. We made pease pudding out of it. One day, someone started thinking that each of the little individual things was an instance of a pea (spelling not being people's strong point back then). It's as if we'd begun to refer to a grain of rice as a rie. That didn't happen because the final [s] sound is pronounced as [s], whereas in pease it's pronounced [z], which is just how the plural <s> is pronounced after a vowel. 

So we've got some people thinking sapiens is the plural of sapien. Can see how that happened: generally, when you hear the term Homo sapiens, someone's talking about the species as a whole, so it makes sense to assume it's plural (referring to all the members of the species). When you want to talk about just one, you use the singular. Obvs. 

So why am I blogging about it? Doesn't seem that fascinating. Although you have learnt about pease, which is definitely worth knowing. Well, I'm blogging about it because although this is a totally predictable, plausible, not-surprising reanalysis and you would think millions of people would get it wrong, no one does. Seriously. Apart from those two musical references, the google hits are sparse. There are not thousands and thousands of people typing blogs and questions and comments and all the other things you'd expect. Why not? How are they all getting it right all of the time? Are they always using the plural and so getting it right without knowing it? Is it just a term that no one who isn't reasonably well-educated uses? What's happening? I feel like I can no longer rely on real-life language to be messy and complicated.

Here is a link to Wikipedia's list of alternative names for the species. 

Agreement fail

In British English, at least, we can use either plural or singular for organisations like the government, the staff  or the audience. So it can be 'the government has announced...' or 'the government have announced...'. On the radio the other day, Sandi Toksvig (yes, she's been in this blog before - I just really like her, OK? Jeez.) said this about stopping terrorists from getting to the Olympics:

Transport for London are doing its bit.

This is in no way a criticism of Sandi - she can do no wrong in my eyes. It's simply an observation on the oddity of English. She's started out with plural agreement (are), because TfL are semantically plural. Like I said, this is totally OK in British English (I think there's some difference between the UK and US on this, but I'm not sure what it is). But then in the same sentence, she uses singular agreement (its) because TfL is grammatically singular.

This variation is common, and speakers are often inconsistent in their use (I know I am) but it's unusual to see it in a single sentence.

Oversuds

I saw the verb oversuds used recently. Clearly it's derived from the noun suds, which became a verb in its own right first. The OED has an entry for suds (v.) dating it back to 1834:

1834   ‘C. Packard’ Recoll. Housekeeper 12   Ma'am Bridge was sudsing the clothes in a tub before her.

It doesn't list over-suds even in the derivatives of suds, though. The prefix over- is attached to suds to give the verb meaning (I presume) to lather up too vigorously or cover in too many soap suds (perhaps giving a surfeit of bubbles, or causing too much mess, or whatever). So far so boring. But I was quite taken with the fact that suds is plural. This is the case when the verb is transitive, as above, or intransitive:

1972   Fortune Jan. 73/1   Detergent foam first became a matter of national concern in the early 1960's, when Representative Henry S. Reuss of Wisconsin, among others, pointed out that detergents were persisting, and sometimes sudsing, in the environment.

Normally, when you form a verb from a noun by simple conversion (as opposed to using a verbal suffix or some other process), it's the singular form of the word that's used. Take the verb bubble. It may actually pre-date the noun bubble, but even if it does, for the purposes of demonstration that doesn't matter. What's important is that there are two words, one a noun and the other a verb, and the verb is homophonous with the singular form of the noun, despite the fact that bubbles, like suds, tend not to occur singularly (in this meaning). A pan of water that's boiling has many bubbles in it, but you still wouldn't say that the water was *bubblesing. Any morphological process is like this, in fact - it's a mousetrap, even if it's used to catch lots of mice, and tights can be footless, even though they lack both feet. It's even a bubble machine, not a bubbles machine, even though it makes millions of bubbles.

Perhaps it's because it's hard to identify a single sud. We can talk about a sud, but it's not generally used in the singular. It is still a count noun, not a mass noun that happens to look like a plural or a pseudo-plural like linguistics. We use it with plural agreement, for instance (though the OED says 'usually'). But we almost always use it in the plural, and I suppose that's influenced the verb formation process. It's very unusual, though.

Hong Kong dollar

Here in the Northeast of England (and in some other British dialects), it's common to hear phrases like ten year or twenty pound, with nouns quantified by a numeral lacking the plural morpheme you'd find in Standard English. It's one of the features of the Geordie dialect I quite like, though I don't do it myself. (Although you'll notice that the colloquial terms quid, nicker and so on tend to be singular - you don't ask someone to lend you twenty quids or twenty nickers. In fact, you'd get some decidedly funny looks if you did ask for that, and possibly a bumper pack of underwear.)

Andrew Graham Dixon presented a Culture Show special called Cash in China's Attic on Friday night, about the booming antiques market in China. He kept on telling us the price of various things, and sometimes he said It's thirty thousand Hong Kong dollars, but sometimes he said It's thirty thousand Hong Kong dollar. He seemed to alternate between using the plural and singular forms. He's not a Geordie, or a speaker of any dialect that this is a feature of, as far as I know. And it's not the case that dollar is always used in the singular in this currency, and he was experiencing L1 influence from English: a Chinese man used the plural form. 

What I think was going on is that he had an interesting case of assimilation to the dialect of many of the people he would have met in Hong Kong. Chinese (Cantonese or any of its other varieties) doesn't have much in the way of inflection, and it doesn't have plural morphology. This means that, although people from Hong Kong mostly seem to speak excellent English, they sometimes make mistakes like not using plural forms. So a lot of antiques dealers and shopkeepers probably told Andrew Graham Dixon the price of things by saying It's one thousand dollar. Either he's just got used to it and started saying it the way everyone else does, or he's assumed that that's the way it's meant to be said and done it consciously. I don't know which, but it sounded decidedly odd. 

This band are...

It's well known that some noun phrases that are grammatically singular but semantically plural (like the government, the staff, the band) can occur as the subject of either a plural or a singular verb form (with pronouns obligatorily matching the verb in number):

The government has said it will cut taxes.
The government have said they will cut taxes.

*The government has said they will cut taxes.
*The government have said it will cut taxes.

This is often said to be a US/UK thing, although you do hear both on both sides of the Atlantic. I noticed a restriction which I'm not sure I've seen discussed before, and that's how it works when you have a demonstrative (or a pseudo-demonstrative, a term I've just made up, for when a word such as this is used in a non-deictic way, as in "So I saw this band, called The Semantic Plurals, last night").

I think, and this is true for me though it may not be for everyone, that if you have a singular demonstrative determiner (this rather than plural these), you can't have a plural verb, it has to be singular to match the determiner:

??This band are going to be playing.
This band is going to be playing. 

But even more interestingly, you just can't have a plural demonstrative determiner - it's far worse:

*These band are going to be playing.
*These band is going to be playing.

So the semantic plurality of a noun can influence number on the verb, but not the determiner - the determiner has to match the grammatical number of the noun. This is presumably because the features percolate upwards and you'd have a clash at DP level if they didn't match.