Re: 'together vs. to gather'

Quoting Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>:

> Yes, number, sorry.
>
> Even in the case of "dust gathered", it looks like it
> means: there were several small grains, or
> discontinuous (discrete) quantities of dust around,
> and they gathered to a sole (continuous) mass. It
> seems not possible to "gather together" if what
> gathers was not separate, thus plural - or is it ?
That is not how I think of it when I gather dust from the top of my bookshelf
or whatever - before it's a spread-out mass, after it's a mass concentrated to
a little mound. And that may be the rub of the matter - plurality, as a
linguistic phenomenon is not so much tied to external reality as to the
speakers' construal thereof. (Please, no-one restart the discussion of what
reality there is - you know what I mean anyway!)

> In case of the transitive form, the plural would apply
> to the object.
For no reason I'm aware of, verbs tend not to agree with their objects (in
accusative languages).

It's of course perfectly possible to have these verbs with grammatically
singular objects - "he gathered a horde of irate linguists", f'rinstance.

> So maybe "to gather" would be the bridge leading from
> plural to mass ?
I think it's a verb, which for semantic reasons tend to have a pl object when
transitive and pl subject when intransitive. But then I'm boring that way!

                                                      Andreas

> --- Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
> >
> > You mean the concept of number, don't you?
> >
> > I assume you're talking about the intransitive
> > versions of those verbs? As
> > long as the subject is to be a count noun, the it
> > pretty much has to be
> > plural, it seems. But if it's mass, then the sg/pl
> > contrast is simply
> > transcended. "Dust gathered in the unused rooms" or
> > whatever.
> >
> >
> >     Andreas
>
>
> =====
> Philippe Caquant
>
> "Le langage est source de malentendus."
> (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
>
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