Dutch collective nouns and conceptual profiling

Collective nouns such as committee, family, or team are conceptually (and in English also syntactically) complex in the sense that they are both singular ("one") and plural ("more than one"): they refer to a multiplicity that is conceptualized as a unity. In this article, which focuses on Dutch collective nouns, it is argued that some collective nouns are rather "one", whereas others are rather "more than one". Collective nouns are shown to be different from one another in member level accessibility. Whereas all collective nouns have both a conceptual collection level ("one") and a conceptual... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Joosten, Frank
De Sutter, Gert
Drieghe, Denis
Grondelaers, Stef
Hartsuiker, Robert
Speelman, Dirk
Dokumenttyp: journalarticle
Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
Schlagwörter: Languages and Literatures / NUMBER AGREEMENT
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-27450696
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/362832

Collective nouns such as committee, family, or team are conceptually (and in English also syntactically) complex in the sense that they are both singular ("one") and plural ("more than one"): they refer to a multiplicity that is conceptualized as a unity. In this article, which focuses on Dutch collective nouns, it is argued that some collective nouns are rather "one", whereas others are rather "more than one". Collective nouns are shown to be different from one another in member level accessibility. Whereas all collective nouns have both a conceptual collection level ("one") and a conceptual member level ("more than one"), the latter is not always conceptually profiled (i.e., focused on) to the same extent. A gradient is sketched in which collective nouns such as bemanning ('crew') (member level highly accessible) and vereniging ('association') (member level scarcely accessible) form the extremes. Arguments in favor of the conceptual phenomenon of variable member level accessibility derive from an analysis of property distribution, from corpus research on verbal and pronominal singular plural variation, and from a psycholinguistic eye-tracking experiment.