Re: 'together vs. to gather'

From all the messages on the subject of “gathering” as
implicitely plural or not, and from closest
investigation in my Harrap’s Shorter for English, I
solemnly confess here that I was wrong when I said
that “to gather” seems to imply the concept of plural.
 One killing counter-example I found in Harrap’s : “a
storm is gathering” = “un orage se prépare” (also:
“with gathering force” = “avec une force croissante”;
but that might be considered as metaphoric or
derived”).

So let’s try it another way. The idea of “gathering”
would just be “to bring something or some things
closer together” (Latin “in simul”). So the concept of
“plural-required” (or “mass-required”) is not included
this way in the generic concept “to gather”, but in
sub-generic concepts like “gathering something like
dust, or honey” or “gathering some things like
strawberries, or coins, or people” (but “the
congregation gathered / dispersed” belongs more likely
to the secund meaning). We could call them “to gather
1” and “to gather 2”. Neither English nor French seem
to have special verbs for that (since they use “to
gather” or “(se) rassembler”), but I would bet some
languages do, even if I don’t know which ones. “To
gather” would already be some generalization
(abstraction) for the both of those concepts.

The very fact that in the definition proposed before,
I had to use the word “OR” proves that “to gather” is
not a primitive concept, but a somehow loose one.

The definition of “to gather 1” could be something
like “before, there are different things separated
from each other; after, those things are closer (less
far) to each other”. “to gather 2” could be: “before,
there is a mass using a certain space extension;
after, that same mass uses less space extension”. They
might be a “to gather 3”: before, there is something
split in a number of separate similar parts; after,
this something is no more separate, but makes a sole
continuous mass”.

We could go further, for instance regarding “to gather
1”: after, either those things are really contiguous
(yet not melted together); or they are only closer
than they were, but not contiguous. For “to gather 2”:
we could distinguish between a 2-dimension space and a
3-dimension space (this has not to be completely
stupid, as English for instance does that distinction
in the case of “through” and “across”, which in French
are the same word “à travers”). Etc.

So if we come back to start : is it plausible that in
some cases, when constructing a language, we have to
include the seme “plural” (for instance) into the
verbal concept itself ? (and not just attach it to a
noun councept ?) Looks like that if we really think
“primitive-oriented”, we might have to. If we rather
think “general-purpose-oriented”, we don’t have to (we
can confound mass and count at the verb level, and do
the distinction by adding a marker, either to the
noun, or to the whole proposition).

I’ve read somewhere that probably people haven’t
always clearly understood that, when they saw a group
of 3 reindeers (for ex), and then another group of 4
reindeers, in both case what they had seen was a group
of reindeers. They might have figured that “a group a
3 reindeers” is an object (they might have called it
“keke” in their own lexicon) and “a group of 4
reindeers” is another one, more or less similar to the
first, but not equal, and they might have called it
“lala”. Then only after thinking for a long time, some
primitive Einstein might have said: “hey, folks, wait
a minute, keke and lala are in fact the same thing,
they only differ by number, so we will call any group
of reindeers “zuzu”, understanding that a zuzu can be
a keke or a lala, or any of those similar concepts we
forged up till now.” (They probably didn’t believe him
at once, and rather threw stones at him). But the
process of abstraction, or generalization, was born
(and the concept of “kind-of”, or categorization, too.
Applause).

I may be wrong, but I tend to look at semantics like
at molecular chemistry. Semes, like atoms, may
combine, but only following certain rules. A natlang
word like “to gather” might be considered as a
(3-dimensional ?) molecule, including a certain number
of primitive semes, combined in a certain way.
Somewhere in the scheme of this molecule, there might
be a sub-whole, let’s call it “mass-or-plural”,
including itself the more simple semes of “mass”, “or”
 and “plural”. There must be that element there,
because if not, there would be no difference between
“gathering” and “meeting” or “joining” for instance.
“People are gathering” can hardly mean that only two
persons are meeting. “Gathering flowers” is not
picking up just one flower. And “gathering dust,
honey, water” implies mass instead of count.

But there also can be other molecules, like
“mass-gathering” or “count-gathering”, their formula
being slightly different. So which ones shall we
lexicalize ? Gathering alone ? Mass-gathering and
count-gathering alone ? Or the three of them ?

--- Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...> wrote:
 Can we not
> conclude from this that a language is free to
> gramaticalize either view?
>

=====
Philippe Caquant

"Le langage est source de malentendus."
(Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

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