Re: USAGE: THEORY/USAGE: irregular English plurals (was: RE:

Quoting And Rosta <a-rosta@...>:

> Tom Wier:
> > > Can you say "The buffalo are scarce today", "These buffalo were
> > > tracked down yesterday"? How about "antelope"? "Wildebeeste"?
> >
> > This may be the "Hunter's nonplural" that I was referring to earlier,
> > although I suspect that this construction is triggered more often by
> > overt quantification.  (Cf. Georgian, e.g., where all overtly quantified
> > nouns may not take plural marking.)
>
> What counts as overt quantification (as the trigger for these
> putative zero plurals in English)?
>
> Number + singular measure noun is common in English, especially in
> trad dialects, but I'm not sure what you have in mind regarding the
> Hunter's Nonplural.
I've never encountered this dialect in person, so it's hard for
me to characterize.  What I've been told is that whereas something
like "I got myself two bears" would be the normal way of using the
plural, "I got myself two bear" would be the "Hunter's plural". In
Georgian, overt pluralization includes nonspecific quantification
with words like "many", "several", and "some".  Don't know if the
English phenomenon is like this.

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier          "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
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