The e-journal Lexis is planning to publish its 10th issue, devoted to ‘the conceptualisation of number in the English lexicon’, in 2016. Main editor: Laure Gardelle (ENS de Lyon).
Call for papers
The conceptualisation of number in the English lexicon
Number, understood here in a narrow sense as the contrast between ‘one’ and ‘more than one’, spontaneously conjures up a grammatical category, which in English distinguishes between the singular and the plural. For several theoretical frameworks, the main meaning of the singular is to refer to one entity, and that of the plural to refer to more than one [Corbett 2000: 4]. This is illustrated, for example, by the pair magazine / magazines. In this case the plural is a feature which is expressed in discourse in the form of an inflection added to a minimal lexical form, which brings its own contribution to the denotation, viz. the value ‘more than one’.
The concepts of ‘one’ and ‘more than one’, however, cut across the grammatical categories of singular and plural. This is what the present issue wishes to explore, in order to describe how ‘one’ and ‘more than one’ are conceptualised in the lexicon. We welcome contributions on the following topics (the list is non-exhaustive):
- lexical plurals: for a number of plural-only nouns, or pluralia tantum, it is impossible to break down the meaning into lexical meaning + ‘more than one’. For instance, measles does not mean one measle + one measle [and so on]; despite the grammatical plural, the word denotes a single disease. Acquaviva [2008: 79] concludes that the plural conceptualises the referent as ‘non simplex’, but that its semantic value for a given noun depends on the way in which the lexical contents of that noun define ‘one’. It could be interesting to study in greater detail the relationship between the lexical contents of a noun and the semantic contribution of grammatical number. Acquaviva’s conclusion also calls for parallel studies of singular mass nouns (singularia tantum).
- collective nouns, aggregates and other nouns denoting internal plurality: linguistic tradition isolates nouns such as family or crockery, which, even when they are grammatically singular, denote a plurality of elements. These nouns all present a double level of conceptualisation: a whole made up of multiple units. More recent studies, however, point out a variety of modes of conceptualisations among those nouns, which could be explored further. For instance, some collective nouns show more permeability than others, in the sense that their attributes are more easily inherited by the units which compose the whole. For example, a young pair implies young people, whereas a young organisation does not imply young members [Joosten et al. 2010]. Some collective nouns group the units together on the basis of spatial contiguity (e.g. pile), others on the basis of temporal contiguity (e.g. succession), and so on [Arigne 2006, 2011]. Papers on the metaphorical use of collective nouns (e.g. an army of business consultants) are also welcome. For instance, Flaux and Van de Velde [2010: 60] show that in French, such collective nouns in determinative uses convey a sense effect of quantity and that they are less sensitive to grammatical number, in the sense that un escadron d’élèves (lit. a squadron of pupils), for example, can denote the same number of pupils as des escadrons d’élèves (squadrons of pupils). The plural mainly has an emphatic role.
- more generally, the use of nouns followed by of will be of interest (e.g. a bit of): for instance, Huddleston and Pullum [2002: 349-350] show that deal requires a singular, uncountable noun to its right (a great deal of work, vs. *a great deal of errors), whereas for some speakers, amount or quantity now license a plural to their right. It could be interesting to study the conceptualisation operated by those nouns in relation to the notions of ‘one’ and ‘more than one’.
- the relationship between grammatical number and massification or abstraction: some nouns denoting aggregates have a massifying effect (e.g. the French noun valetaille), or an abstracting effect in the case of hyperonyms – such as jewellery, which Wierzbicka [1988] terms a ‘collective supercategory’. Similar effects might also occur in discourse, with noun phrases such as all that succession and repetition of massed humanity. Another case is that of morphological plurals, which do not guarantee that the entity denoted by the noun can be counted (e.g. *he counted the furnishings, [Acquaviva 2008: 87]). In this sense, the conceptualisation conveyed by such a noun is the result of a process of abstraction.
- some nouns are morphologically invariable, either systematically so (e.g. sheep) or only in contexts of hunting or conservation (e.g. elephant) ([Allan 1976], [Corbett 2000]). It could be interesting to study the relationship between the lack of plural morphology and the conceptualisation of the animal, taking the variety of cases into account – Allan shows that some nouns are more likely than others to have no final –s in these contexts (e.g. hyena vs. teal).
- the place of prefixes in the conceptualisation of number: for instance, Richet [2005] shows that one language might consider an element as ‘more than one’, via a multiplying prefix (e.g. quadruple croche in French), while another will make it a fraction of ‘one’ (e.g. hemidemisemiquaver). This phenomenon again calls for further study of the factors at play in the conceptualisation of a unit.
- recategorisation effects: the way an element is perceived might lead to a change in the grammatical behaviour of the corresponding noun. This is the case for instance with ‘unit plurals’ [Corbett 2000], such as coffees vs. (some) coffee, for which sensitivity to grammatical number is a consequence of the change in the conceptualisation of the entity. It could be interesting to study the limits of this correspondence, in standard language as well as in creative uses.
References
Acquaviva, Paolo. Lexical Plurals: A Morphosyntactic Approach. Coll. Theoretical Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.
Allan, Keith. Collectivizing. Archivum Linguisticum 7, 1976: 99-117.
Arigne, Viviane. Les discrets collectifs face aux massifs: des modes de discrétisation du massif (version longue). In Jean-Claude Souesme (dir.), Le qualitatif, Cycnos 23:1, 2006. <http://revel.unice.fr/ >
Arigne, Viviane. La figure du tout intégré et les noms discrets collectifs. Anglophonia 30, 2011: 59-99.
Corbett, Greville G. Number. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
Flaux, Nelly & Danièle Van de Velde. Les noms en français: esquisse de classement. Paris: Ophrys, 2000.
Huddleston, Rodney & Geoffrey K. Pullum. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.
Joosten, Frank et al. Dutch Collective Nouns and Conceptual Profiling. Linguistics 45:1, 2007: 85-132.
<http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/144837/1/Joosten,_De_Sutter,_Drieghe_et_al._(2007).pdf>
Richet, Bertrand. Des chiffres et des lettres : expression(s) du nombre en anglais contemporain. Cercles, 2005.
< http://www.cercles.com/occasional/ops2-2005/richet.pdf>
Wierzbicka, Anna. The Semantics of Grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1988.
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Manuscripts may be written in French or in English, and should be accompanied by an abstract of up to 10 lines in French and in English, as well as a list of the relevant key words. They should be sent to the Editor of Lexis (lexis@univ-lyon3.fr) as email attachments (Word and pdf), and will be refereed by two members of the international evaluation committee. Manuscripts may be rejected, accepted subject to revision, or accepted as such. There is no limit to the number of pages.
Abstracts and articles will be sent via email to lexis@univ-lyon3.fr
• January 2015: call for papers
• June 2015: deadline for sending in abstracts to lexis
• September 2015: Evaluation Committee’s decisions notified to authors
• November 2015: deadline for sending in papers
• November-December 2015: proofreading of papers by the Evaluation committee
• January-February 2016: authors’ corrections
• March 2016: deadline for sending in final versions of papers.
