Re: Number/Specificality/Archetypes in Language

From:    John Leland <Lelandconlang@...>
> << "The
> United States of America *is*" >>
> I believe Shelby Foote or some pundit on the Civil War TV series said that
> the normal usage before the Civil War was "The United States are"
He did indeed.  Which just goes to show that number agreement in
English cannot be purely determined based on either semantics or
morphology, since more recent American English has changed in this
respect.  It's possible that all lexical items may simply lexically
specify what "number" they are, and failure to agree is simply a
feature-clash, i.e., there is no trigger or controller of agreement.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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