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Associative plural marking in English varieties

Investigating the expression of group reference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2023

Maryann Overstreet Open the ORCID record for Maryann Overstreet [Opens in a new window]  and
George Yule
Maryann Overstreet*
Affiliation:
Languages and Literatures of Europe and the Americas, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Honolulu, United States
George Yule
Affiliation:
Independent Scholar, Kaaawa, United States
*
Corresponding author: Maryann Overstreet; Email: overst@hawaii.edu
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Extract

We normally think of ‘plural’ in English in terms of reference to more than one, as in the use of the word dogs to refer to more than one dog. This is described as the ‘ordinary’ or ‘additive’ plural, which has referential homogeneity in the sense that every member of the group referenced by dogs is a dog. In contrast, there is another type of plural which is used for human groups and has referential heterogeneity, that is, each member of the referenced group is a separate individual.1 In addition, each of those members is associated in some way, typically as family, friend or habitual companion, with a prominent member of the group, hence the term ‘associative’ plural for the construction. The following description is from Moravcsik (2003).

Associative plurals will be taken to be constructions whose meaning is ‘X and X's associate(s),’ where all members are individuals, X is the focal referent, and the associate(s) form a group centering around X. (pp. 470–471)

Type
Shorter Article
Information
English Today , First View , pp. 1 - 5
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Corpora consulted (accessed on July 20th, 2023)

BNC = British National Corpus. https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/Google Scholar
COCA = Corpus of Contemporary American English. https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/Google Scholar
EEBO = Early English Books Online. https://www.english-corpora.org/eebo/Google Scholar
OED = Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edn. online. http://www.oed.com/Google Scholar

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