English grammar quiz
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9 Chickweed Lane for 9/20/2011:
Reader AB asks:
As a non-native speaker, I find the use of both 15-foot and 15 feet within the same text balloon puzzling (third panel). Is there an explanation?
Needless to say, Sister Steven has the grammar exactly right, at least according to the norms of standard written English. But what are (the relevant aspects of) those norms, anyway?
I'm going to let commenters do the analytical work here, and explain to AB the principles behind Sister Steven's morpho-syntactic choices. But to help them along, I'll present a small annotated catalogue of examples from the COCA corpus.
First, let's note that foot will always be singular when it's, well, singular:
Mature plants have a mounded habit and are rarely over a foot tall.
These species grow less than 1 foot tall and are hardy to at least zone 2B.
These are small cats, about a foot tall and 15 to 25 pounds
And we'll want to ignore quoted passages that may reflect regional or other non-standard usage (since Sister Steven would never indulge in such things):
"The first people in here wasn't but four foot tall, " he said. " I call' em the Little People."
So putting these two categories aside, we can collect a few examples of "N foot tall":
[T]he real stars are the inhabitants of Pandora — ten foot tall blue people with tails.
He wasn't the six foot tall, rangy cowboy she used to know.
White Dome Geyser's unique structure is a 12 foot tall sinter cone.
We can see the magnificent 30 foot to 40 foot tall dunes of pure, golden sand.
And similarly, some examples of "N feet tall":
He was six feet tall, broad shouldered, with thick black hair, blue eyes, and a smile that got your attention.
The librarian was five feet tall.
He was not quite six feet tall and had large ears and a long face with a bit of a lantern jaw.
Two 1.5-ton cast bronze trees, soaring to nearly 23 feet tall, appear to be reaching for the light emanating from the upper decks.
So what is the descriptive generalization? What other facts about the language is it related to? Is there a more general explanation, and if so, what is it?
And for extra credit, what's going on with the varieties of English where the patterns are different?
RP said,
September 20, 2011 @ 5:55 am
It seems we use the singular form when the adjectival expression is attributive and the plural when it's predicative. This is also seen in "a five-metre-long stick"/"the stick is five metres long", and must be related to distinctions such as "a sausage-eating man"/"the man is eating sausages"; "a pigeon sanctuary"/"the sanctuary is for pigeons"; "a coin slot"/"the slot is for coins".
James said,
September 20, 2011 @ 6:24 am
A ten-gallon hat, Nine-inch nails, an 80-pound shell, a five-cent haircut. So, yes, attributive position for nouns used as adjectives (that is, adjective-functioning nouns).
A toothbrush (not teethbrush), my sock drawer, a man-eating shark; related even though there is no question of numerical determiners.
[(myl) Some relevant LL posts:
"Postcard from Vegas, 3: regularly-inflected plurals exclusion? I don't think so", 12/1/2003
"Activities centers in Paradise and Santa Cruz", 12/1/2003
"The rigors of fieldwork trips", 12/1/2003
There are a few others as well, but those will do for a start.]
But this doesn't add much to what RP said.
JB said,
September 20, 2011 @ 7:10 am
How about plural in an adjective phrase and singular as a modifier in a noun phrase (or compound noun)?
pj said,
September 20, 2011 @ 7:27 am
I'm over five feet tall. In fact, I'm five foot seven.
And I'm very confused now.
Graham Strong said,
September 20, 2011 @ 7:44 am
RP, James, and JB have it right. I can't name exactly what grammatical mechanisms are working here (what RP said sounds good…), but I do have this to add:
Part of the confusion in the examples here is that you are missing a hyphen in the first set of examples. It should be "ten-foot blue people with tails", "he wasn't the six-foot-tall, rangy cowboy", etc. as in the original Sister Steven example.
A similar example that jumps to my mind is "the six-year-old" vs. "six years old".
~Graham
RP said,
September 20, 2011 @ 7:47 am
James's examples raise some further questions. Take the five-cent haircut, for instance. We have a "pound coin" or "five-pound note", but in the UK we also have a "five-pence piece" – yet "pence" is undeniably a plural, even if it is an irregular one and does not apply to every sense of the word "penny". "Five-penny piece" is possible, but does it apply exclusively to the old coin pre-decimalisation?
Other non-standard forms similar to non-standard uses of "foot" include the use of "pound", as in both "it weighs ten pound" and "it costs ten pound", where standard usage would require "pounds". However, it isn't immediately clear that these are cases where the singular form has been used in place of the plural. They might rather be cases where a plural form has been used but the plural happens to be identical to the singular.
The OED says under "pound": "The unchanged plural was long retained following a cardinal number, a common feature of words denoting units of measurement (compare foot n. 7a, mark n.2, etc.), and still common in colloquial and regional English." As I've indicated, you don't need a number after "pound" for some speakers to use the unchanged form. But this does explain "five foot seven", where this older way of speaking is still in use. Under "foot" (n.7a) in the OED: "Often in sing. when preceded by numerals."
languagehat said,
September 20, 2011 @ 8:10 am
As a historical sidelight, the apparent singular is in origin the Old English genitive plural.
Pete said,
September 20, 2011 @ 8:22 am
Yeah it's plural when predicative, and singular when attributive. The attributive is often hyphenated in spelling as well.
For regular nouns at least, this pattern is pretty solid:
– He's five years old.
– He's a five-year-old boy.
But:
– *He's five year old. (non-standard but acceptable in some dialects)
– *He's a five-years-old boy. (ungrammatical)
(With "year", there's also a compound noun [he's a] "five-year-old", which has no counterpart for "foot" but does confirm JB's theory.)
However, I think you find more variation when the noun in question has an irregular plural, like foot-feet, or penny-pence.
Also, the first usage in the comic ('you forgot the 15-foot-tall part') is not really an attributive (qualifying the noun 'part'), but a quotation: 'you forgot the "15-foot-tall" part'. So 'you forgot the "15 feet tall" part' actually seems more appropriate to me.
Yinglun said,
September 20, 2011 @ 8:25 am
As a non-native speaker from China I was taught to remember by heart that:
I am [15 years old]. ~= I am a [15-year-old] girl.
in the same way that
I am [fat]. ~= I am a [fat] man.
and etc. The same principle applies to '15 feet tall' vs. 'the 15-foot-tall part'.
David L said,
September 20, 2011 @ 8:26 am
I'm 5 foot 9. I'm 5 feet 9. Either one sounds OK to me — if anything, I prefer the latter.
Similarly, in the cartoon, that character could say "you forgot the 15 feet tall part." That sounds perfectly fine to me. Is usage changing on this issue? Regionally variable?
Pete said,
September 20, 2011 @ 8:26 am
PS: With "five-pence piece", the status of "pence" as the plural of "penny" is questionable, since you can now say:
– ?one pence (I think this is acceptable nowadays)
– two pennies (means two 1p coins; not the same as "two pence")
TonyK said,
September 20, 2011 @ 8:46 am
Buffy Sainte-Marie's ballad "Universal Soldier" starts: "He's five foot two, and he's six feet four". Which sounds just right to me. But why?
U said,
September 20, 2011 @ 8:46 am
On the currency question, the other day I caught myself saying "I have a one rand" (rand being South African currency) which seemed non-standard. But it's not the same as "I have one rand" — this could mean "I have two fifty-cent coins" (to return briefly to the topic, each of these is worth fifty cents) but "a one rand" means "a one-rand coin".
Is this a South Africanism?
Coby Lubliner said,
September 20, 2011 @ 9:02 am
There are some peculiar, geographically marked, cases of plural nouns used attributively: US sports (UK sport) section; UK drugs (US drug) dealer. I have never quite understood them.
Mark Etherton said,
September 20, 2011 @ 9:02 am
Old joke:
There's a couple of two six-foot policemen outside.
What, two Yard men?
Mr Fnortner said,
September 20, 2011 @ 9:07 am
I've always taken refuge in the explanation that English (generally) does not use plural adjectives, thus a fifty-foot tall woman, a two-pound bag, and a three-hour layover are consistent with leather seats rather than leathers seats.
Richard Wein said,
September 20, 2011 @ 9:21 am
That's an interesting point about "five-pence piece". As someone who's old enough to remember pre-decimal currency, I'm pretty sure that this usage only started after decimalisation. Perhaps it was partly an attempt to make a clear distinction from the old currency, at a time when both were in circulation. There was a lot of emphasis at the time on the expression "new pence" and perhaps the word "pence" became particularly associated with the new currency. Before decimalisation I think it was rarely if ever ever used as a separate word. We used to say "sixpence" (with the stress on the first syllable) rather than "six pence".
pj said,
September 20, 2011 @ 9:23 am
RP, I should think a fivepenny piece pre-decimalisation would have got you about as far as a nine-bob note.
Hugo said,
September 20, 2011 @ 9:33 am
As a Québécois / French Canadian, I always understood this issue as RP, James and others have described, "He's five years old" VS "He's a five-year-old (boy)" being an easy reminder for me.
He's five years old. He's old of a certain number of years. That number being five, 'year' is plural. Easy to explain.
He's a five-year-old (boy). We expect a noun phrase, so the adjectival phrase "five years old" doesn't work. "five-year-old" gets turned into a noun somehow? Less clear…
What I can gather, from other comments and my own experience:
noun modifier/phrase: singular
adjective phrase: plural
It seems that's how it works. How it came to be like this? Why would we consider "five-year-old" some kind of a noun? That's another issue, to which I have no answer. Languagehat's comment about the OE genitive is interesting though, and makes sense to me.
On the currency issue, I can comfortably say that in French (at least in Québec), it is perfectly acceptable to say "J'ai un un dollar", meaning "I have a one dollar / a one-dollar coin". It's not the same as "J'ai un dollar", meaning "I have cash totaling one dollar". This is mostly like the "a one rand" thing.
John O'Toole said,
September 20, 2011 @ 9:35 am
If I'm not mistaken, Pinker goes over the data on this sort of thing in a chapter entitled "Of Mice and Men" in _Words and Rules_(1999), which is a delight to read anyway, even if I'm off on the reference. It has something to do with "regulars" and "irregulars" (pound=>pounds, but foot=>feet and mouse=>mice, etc.) and their presence in compounds that modify a noun. Thus, "a house infested with rats" => "a rat-infested house," but "a house infested with mice" => "a mouse-infested house." Thus, a nun who is fifteen feet tall, but a fifteen-foot-tall nun. This is the right paradigm, no?
Andrew (not the same one) said,
September 20, 2011 @ 9:56 am
Before decimalisation I think it was rarely if ever ever used as a separate word. We used to say "sixpence" (with the stress on the first syllable) rather than "six pence".
Yes indeed. And of course, we rarely had reason to refer to any number of pence greater than twelve, as that was a shilling (though we might sometimes have reason to refer to more than twleve pennies, i.e. the coins). I think the growth in the use of 'pence' comes from two sources: we found ourselves having to refer to sums like sixty-five pence: and for the smaller sums, we would say 'six pence' rather than 'sixpence' because it obviously wasn't sixpence, a definite sum with associations of its own.
From this, we then get the back-formation 'one pence'. We were meant to say 'one penny', but a lot of people were reluctant to say that because it so obviously wasn't a penny. (I mean, look at it. How can you call that a penny?)
John Chew said,
September 20, 2011 @ 10:04 am
My NSOJ(apanese) mom was always bothered by the plural in the phrase "blue skies" – would anyone care to take a stab at explaining that one? (She also found it amusing that "panties" are plural and "bra" is singular, but that's easier to understand on etymological grounds.)
Zythophile said,
September 20, 2011 @ 10:08 am
I don't think you can call "one pence" a "back formation" – the back (or reverse) clearly still says one penny.
Anna said,
September 20, 2011 @ 10:14 am
i was thinking about Pinker as well and looked it up. He says that in compounds you may find irregular plurals but never regular ones (mice-infested vs. *rats-infested) due to the fact that in his theory irregular plurals are stored in memory but regulars are not. For the compounding process only roots stored in memory are available as input that is why we get mice-infested but not rats-infested.
this doesn't solve the problem though, since in this theory we would expect a 15-feet-tall person
Dan Lufkin said,
September 20, 2011 @ 10:17 am
@languagehat — Yes, good point. Use of the old gen. pl. without -s after numerals goes back to Malory: twelve moneth, an honderd pound contrasted with fourty yere, ten fadom, seven myle. McKnight's The Evolution of the English Language (Dover, 1956) has a brief discussion.
I think I recall from my mercifully brief (post-Sputnik) exposure to Russian grammar that the genitive case is used after numbers (dva pivikh).
Dan Lufkin said,
September 20, 2011 @ 10:21 am
@John Chew — Pants: plural or singular?
Plural at the bottom, singular at the top.
George said,
September 20, 2011 @ 10:24 am
@ John O'Toole
You write: Thus, "a house infested with rats" => "a rat-infested house," but "a house infested with mice" => "a mouse-infested house."
I don't get the 'but' here. It looks to me like exactly the same thing is going on. Am I being really dim here?
[(myl) The observation, if you accept the facts as claimed, is that the first compound element in "rat-infested" is singular, while the first compound element in "mice-infested" is plural. The explanation that has been offered is that English compound words may contain irregular plurals (like "mice") but not regular plurals (like "rats").]
majolo said,
September 20, 2011 @ 11:18 am
Thinking about variations on this, I'm puzzled by when the "tall" part (specifying the dimension) is required, optional, or forbidden:
six-year old child, not *six-year child
ten-foot long pole or ten-foot pole
300 pound gorilla, not *300 pound weight gorilla
John Lawler said,
September 20, 2011 @ 11:22 am
My favorite classroom example was
an eleven-year-old boy
vs
a boy eleven years old
not to mention *shoes store.
This was in the section where we were dealing with clause reductions; the takeaway rule is "One-word modifiers precede, modifiers of many words follow."
The singular-only part seems to be part of a general rule against inflections in English modifiers. I believe that Pinker believes that mice-infested is grammatical, and it probably is for some people. In my experience, for any construction, there are people who will find it grammatical.
John Lawler said,
September 20, 2011 @ 11:25 am
Oops. Sorry, the general rule is against inflections in single-word modifiers, which of course precede their head in English.
Glenn Bingham said,
September 20, 2011 @ 11:30 am
As far as exceptional dialects, people in a trade will often use the singular as a collective term in place of the plural form. The easiest example is found at the slaughterhouse as Joe Cowpoke is asked, "How many steers do you have there?" and replies "50 head" rather than "50 heads." Carpenters would say "I have 100 foot of heart pine," and in some places, even "pass me 4 board." I think these forms are quickly dying out in the US, and aside from the Cowboy cliche, I don't think I've heard much of the other for a couple of decades. I am a decades-old person, so I need to measure time[s] that way.
Glenn Bingham said,
September 20, 2011 @ 11:31 am
@U
Not a South Africanism. If I have one dollar (U$), then it could be a dollar bill or a collection of coins that add up to 100 cents. If I said, "I have a one," it would mean (in context) that I possess a single piece of paper worth a dollar. I'd prefer to have a 50, but I rarely get to see one, let alone possess it.
Russell said,
September 20, 2011 @ 11:37 am
Possible exception, even in an attributive->singular world: bare plurals indicating "many, or more than expected"
The Eastern Garbage Patch is a miles-wide collection of garbage in the North Pacific
End-of-term clemency is a centuries-old, often vilified tradition
Never have we looked at the ocean, from the surface through the depths to the miles-deep seafloor, in one long gaze.
teucer said,
September 20, 2011 @ 11:38 am
The adjectival phrase "N feet/foot tall" takes the singular form when separated from its head by a copula.
"The 15-foot tall part" is quoting a previous (off-camera) use of "15-foot-tall." She did not previously say *"I want to be the pope and 15 foot tall," but rather, something like "I want to be a 15-foot-tall pope."
Greg Bowen said,
September 20, 2011 @ 12:02 pm
Regarding the bit where she says "You forgot the 15-foot-tall part," some above have suggested that it should be "15 feet tall" or that both are acceptable.
It seems to me that it depends on what is being quoted, which happens off-stage. If she had earlier said something like, "I want to be the pope and I want to be 15 feet tall," I'd think her later reference would also have "15 feet tall." If she'd said instead, "I want to be a 15-foot-tall pope," then it'd be as it appears in the strip. I don't think the distinction is absolute, but I think that might play a role.
Cameron Majidi said,
September 20, 2011 @ 2:25 pm
Way back at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3440#comment-138785 James referred to "adjective-functioning nouns". Coincidentally, in the latest issue of his e-magazine, Michael Quinion refers to the word "nounjective" that someone has coined as an (unneeded) alternate name for attributive nouns. Read about it here: http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/ylbd.htm#N3
Carl said,
September 20, 2011 @ 3:19 pm
I had to figure this out myself when I taught English in Japan. The joy of ESL is you get to learn all the secret rules of English you never had to learn in school because you just knew them anyway.
BobC said,
September 20, 2011 @ 3:27 pm
The first line of the old song "Has Anybody Seen My Gal?" is "Five foot two, eyes of blue." – which never looked right to me. Either his gal is five feet two (inches), or he's referring to his five-foot two(-inch) gal.
languageandhumor said,
September 20, 2011 @ 3:29 pm
On Steven Pinker's point (definitely in "The Language Instinct" if not in "Words and Rules"):
I don't know about noun-participle hyphenates, but the rule Pinker describes that nouns with regular plurals are singular in noun phrases (his example: "a rat catcher" not "*a rats catcher") doesn't hold entirely for British English, where "a drugs cartel" and other such things that I don't recall can be heard on BBC World News.
[(myl) There are common counterexamples in American English as well, like "activities center" — see e.g. here.]
Ellen K. said,
September 20, 2011 @ 5:57 pm
I've always taken refuge in the explanation that English (generally) does not use plural adjectives, thus a fifty-foot tall woman, a two-pound bag, and a three-hour layover are consistent with leather seats rather than leathers seats.
I agree with your point, but as far as that particular example goes, nope. It's "leather" and not "leathers" simply because "leather" is a non-count noun.
John O'Toole said,
September 20, 2011 @ 6:37 pm
Mea culpa for the confusion sown in my earlier comment, where I mentioned the paradigm in Pinker's _Words and Rules_. I forgot the * symbol on "mouse-infested house" to indicate that it was a nongrammatical utternance. Also, as languageandhumor points out, there is indeed a section of _The Language Instinct_ (1994) devoted to the same question. It is found in the chapter called "Words, Words, Words." An appropriate conclusion from that chapter: "…Gordon's mice-eater [word] experiment shows that in morphology children automatically distinguish between roots stored in the mental dictionary and inflected words created by a rule." Greg Bowen above is definitely on to something, no? The difference would be clearer with quotation marks: 'You forgot the 'fifteen feet tall' part." The cartoon character is confusing that construction with a "fifteen-foot-tall part," presumably some part of her now gigantic person that is fifteen feet tall. Does the answer lie along these lines?
dazeystarr said,
September 20, 2011 @ 7:34 pm
@Ellen K. – FWIW, "leather" can be a count noun when it means "an article of clothing made of leather". It's frequently used as such in the motorcycling community, where you'll see bikers arrayed in their leathers.
Jonathan D said,
September 20, 2011 @ 7:40 pm
How many people now actually say 'six pence', rather than 'six p'? No issue with plurals then…
Julie said,
September 20, 2011 @ 8:29 pm
"Mouse-infested" sounds just fine to me, while "mice-infested" seems wrong. "Mice-eater" seems a bit odd; "mouse-eater" is much better to my ear. I can't say "drinks server" or "activities center," either. Although in both of those contexts, the following "s" sound might create the impression of a nonexistent plural.
I've apparently internalized a special rule for certain measures, allowing them to be singular in some contexts where other words must be plural. I suspect this is dialectal. The following do not sound wrong to me (although they do look odd and I probably would never write them):
It's 40 mile up the road.
She's five foot tall.
@majolo:
For comparison:
The child is six years old.
The pole is ten feet long.
The gorilla weighs 300 pounds.
*The gorilla is 300 pounds heavy.
The male gorilla is 100 pounds heavier than the female.
This parallel set is too stuffy for conversation, but you'll see it in legal documents and the like:
The child is six years of age.
The pole has ten feet of length.
The gorilla has 300 pounds of weight.
languageandhumor said,
September 20, 2011 @ 10:22 pm
@Mark Liberman: Thank you. I wonder if semantically "Activities Center" is distinguishing a center where you do various crafts/dances/etc. from a center where various actions are taking place. "Activity Center" sounds like a military/espionage ops room.
On a related note, the adjective is "lousy" not *"licey" even though, in its literal usage, you're not going to be infested with just one louse. Similarly, computer programs have to have at least several bugs to be "buggy" (not *"bugsy.")
Jerry Friedman said,
September 21, 2011 @ 12:54 am
Here's MWDEU on "foot" and "feet". They say "foot" is used particularly before numbers (of inches) and before adjectives such as "tall" and "deep", and that in print it's more common in Britain than America, but in speech it's common in both countries.
They mention the use of "foot" in attributive adjectives ("between a number and a noun") but don't say that it's part of the pattern people have described above.
On another note, I. A. Horowitz's Chess Openings: Theory and Practice (1964) analyzes the Four Pawn Attack (in Alekhine's Defense) and the Two Knights Defense. Why the difference? I don't know. Chessgames.com calls the former the Four Pawns Attack.
It's late. I need to brush my teeth with a teethbrush.
Lucus said,
September 21, 2011 @ 11:37 am
I generally use "foot", for every case. But that might be a regional thing.
Sometimes I use "feet", and it sounds just as good to me when I hear it, but the two ways are essentially totally interchangeable to me.
Keith said,
September 22, 2011 @ 3:03 pm
For me, it's simple: in English, adjectives are invariable.
In the construction "a ten foot pole", 'ten foot' functions as an adjective to qualify the noun 'pole'.
American usage seems to be deviating from this. I wonder if it is the influence of Spanish, or of other languages, where the adjective agrees in number with the noun.
And as an aside, why do you say that the word 'mouse' has an irregular plural
It follows the rule for its class of nouns where sing. medial 'ou' -> 'i'. Mouse -> mice just as louse -> lice.
That there are only two nouns in this class is unfortunate, but still…
K.
Jerry Friedman said,
September 22, 2011 @ 4:41 pm
@Keith: I'd say agreeing with nouns, as in Spanish, would be more like "one ten-foot pole", "two ten-feet poles". Even more like something we've had for a long time: "men friends" and "women writers" (but not *"children prodigies").
Ellen K. said,
September 22, 2011 @ 11:02 pm
@Keith: The plural of "house" is not "hice". The plural of "blouse" is not "blice". The plural of "spouse" is not "spice". Regular plurasl outnumber irregular for -ouse words. Plus, "louse" also has "louses" as a plural.
Janice Byer said,
September 23, 2011 @ 12:54 am
"The first line of the old song "Has Anybody Seen My Gal?" is 'Five foot two, eyes of blue.' – which never [sounded] right to me. Either his gal is five feet two (inches), or he's referring to his five-foot two(-inch) gal."
Or, he could be saying his gal has big blue eyes, really big blue eyes.
Keith said,
September 23, 2011 @ 1:41 pm
@Ellen K.: I don't dispute that there are many more nouns that form the plural by simply adding a letter S. I wrote that there were only to nouns in the class ou -> i, but if you include 'goose', 'woman', 'man', 'tooth' and 'foot', the class is a bit bigger. Wiktionary doesn't even list these as "irregular", but calls them "ablaut plurals".
As for 'louse' -> 'louses'… it's non-standard. I don't think I've ever encountered 'louses' in the wild.
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=louses%2C+lice&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
K.
Ellen K. said,
September 23, 2011 @ 4:16 pm
Try a google search. Admittedly, many hits will be for the verb, but there will be hits for the noun.
And my point is, there's no "-ouse" class with the "-ice" plural. To suggest mouse and louse are a class is artificial. There's nothing that distinguishes them from other -ouse words.
Bessel Dekker said,
September 24, 2011 @ 7:08 pm
Apologies if I have overlooked an reply along the following lines above. The examples in the comic are slightly misleading, in that they obfuscate the general rule, which, as I was taught, is this:
[numeral]+[nominal measure qualifyer]+[noun head] realises the measure in the singular
("a ten-foot ladder")
[numeral]+[nominal measure noun head]-[noun head] realises the measure in the plural
("ten feet", which may of course be extended to any degree: "ten feet tall, ten feet from here to the wall" etc.).
Where the numeral is absent, quite different rules apply, which should be thrashed out each by themselves. It might be speculated, for instance, that "activities centre" emphasises a variety of activities, while "activitiy centre" is unmarked in this respect. But that is mere speculation, as far as I can see.
The above does not, of course, explain why [attributive [numeral]+[nominal measure qualifyer]+[noun head] requires a singular measure qualifyer ("a ten-foot ladder"). It just describes the phenomenon. It is easier to account for the plural in "ten feet": [numeral]+[nominal measure noun head]-[noun head] after all, numerals except "one" agree with plural noun heads.
Bessel Dekker said,
September 24, 2011 @ 7:13 pm
CORRECTED TEXT:
Apologies if I have overlooked a reply along the following lines above. The examples in the comic are slightly misleading in that they obfuscate the general rule, which, as I was taught, is this:
[numeral]+[nominal measure qualifyer]+[noun head] realises the measure in the singular
("a ten-foot ladder")
[numeral]+[nominal measure noun head]-[noun head] realises the measure in the plural
("ten feet", which may of course be extended to any degree: "ten feet tall, ten feet from here to the wall" etc.).
Where the numeral is absent, quite different rules apply, which should be thrashed out each by themselves. It might be speculated, for instance, that "activities centre" emphasises a variety of activities, while "activity centre" is unmarked in this respect. But that is mere speculation, as far as I can see.
The above does not, of course, explain why [attributive [numeral]+[nominal measure qualifyer]+[noun head]] requires a singular measure qualifyer ("a ten-foot ladder"). It just describes the phenomenon. It is easier to account for the plural in "ten feet": [numeral]+[nominal measure noun head]-[noun head] after all, numerals except "one" agree with plural noun heads.
Bessel Dekker said,
September 25, 2011 @ 5:45 am
If Wiktionary are calling 'lice', 'mice', 'geese', 'women', 'men', 'teeth' and 'feet' "ablaut plurals", they are probably confusing "ablaut" (gradation) with "umlaut" (mutation). This does not make them a class of plurals, however. It only testifies to a stage in the language when front mutation took place under the influence of a front vowel in the ultimate syllable. These are survivals from Old English, and they are rather haphazard. For instance, *'beek' for 'books' has not survived.
Nor was this solely a matter of singular-plural opposition. The dative (indirect object) case of the singular was similar: 'feet', 'men', 'beek'.
Diachronically, this might be regarded as a subclass of noun flexion, i.e. "monosyllabic consonant declension", but from a synchronically it is hard to regard the group as anything rather than exceptions.
[(myl) Though irregular inflection sometimes spreads by analogy, as some verb forms have done in the recent history of English.]
Bessel Dekker said,
September 25, 2011 @ 6:13 am
*from a synchronical point of view*–sorry.
Bessel Dekker said,
September 25, 2011 @ 6:17 am
Analogy is of course possible, and it complicates the matter. Thus, even in Old English grammar, "women" could hardly be regarded as a monosyllable. It conformed to the monosyllabic consonant declension on the analogy of "men".
Bessel Dekker said,
September 30, 2011 @ 3:08 am
@Mark Liberman: When you say, "Though irregular inflection sometimes spreads by analogy, as some verb forms have done in the recent history of English", do you mean forms such as "snuck" for "sneaked"?