Re: 'together vs. to gather'

In a message dated 1/17/2004 6:31:35 PM Eastern Standard Time,
hotblack@FRATH.NET writes:

>E f+AOk-sto Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>:
>> This brings me to a question I'm trying to solve. I've
>> often read that the concept "gender" (singular /
>> plural) attaches logically to the subject; if there is
>> a gender mark on the verb, it's only by some kind of
>> "sympathy". But how can we conceive verbs like "to
>> gather" or "to disperse" without the notion of plural
>> ? Those verbs seem to BE plural in essence, they
>> require a plural subject.
>1) Gender is not the same thing as number.  Number is often inflected in
>verbs; English does this, so there is no "without the notion of plural"
>here.
>2) The intransitive senses of |gather| and |disperse| are middle verbs
>*derived* from their transitive counterparts.  The only reason they seem
>to require plural subjects is because the semantics of the transitive
>involve iteration over or dissemination of the object.
>3) They don't require plural subjects anyway.  "Water gathers in these
>puddles," "The congregation disperses immediately after the preacher
>finishes."
The last example misses (what I take to be) the point of this thread, because
although "the congregation" is not morphologically plural or (necessarily)
syntactically plural, it is what you might call "semantically plural."

Other English verbs that have been said to require subjects or objects that
are plural (in some perhaps ill-defined semantic sense) are "scatter" and
"massacre."  You could scatter twenty golf balls around your living roon, but you
could hardly scatter one golf ball (or even two).

The person who started this thread might be interested in the discussion of
verbal vs. nominal number in Greville Corbett's book _Number_.  It
distinguishes nominal number, which is more closely concerned with nouns, even though it
can be marked on the verb by agreement, from verbal number, which concerns the
plurality of events rather than objects, and which is more closely concerned
with the verb.

Doug


Doug

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