Re: 'together vs. to gather'

Philippe Caquant wrote at 2004-01-17 08:02:15 (-0800)

 > If you had to draw a symbol for "to gather" or "to disperse" (both
 > intransitive), how would you do ? You would probably draw several
 > arrows (at least three) into separate directions from a same point,
 > or pointing to a single point from different directions (see
 > PowerPoint symbols for ex). With other verbs of movement (to go, to
 > go up / down, to go around, etc), you would draw a single arrow,
 > oriented one or another way, straight or curve, etc. That's way I
 > think that those verbs contain a seme of "plural".

Yes, but if you draw a diagram of, say, a magnetic field, you also
have to draw multiple arrows.  These aren't real entities, they're
just the best way we have of indicating a vector field on paper - in
reality, the field is continuous.  So I don't find this particular
argument very persuasive.

I'm not sure convinced either way as to whether "gather" implies
plurality.  I would suggest that it's language-dependant... I mean,
there are a lot of subtly different usages of "gather" in English, and
it seems to me that some of them imply a kind of plurality, even when
used with mass nouns, and others don't.

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