A more complete information

[Beverly Flanigan]

I agree.  People (not only students!) often make changes but fail to go
back to delete changed material.  This does not read like nonnative
English; the clausal object of prep. is usually beyond NNSs.  But NNSs
often pluralize 'information', 'research', etc. and likewise make the
singular countable.

At 06:46 AM 5/24/2004 -0700, you wrote:
>Maybe it's just a typo.
>
>
>--- Damien Hall <halldj at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU> wrote:
> > What do people on this list think about whether
> > *information* is countable?  I
> > got the following in a University-wide e-mail
> > recently.
> >
> > ============
> >
> > Join your fellow students for a more complete
> > information about what is
> > already underway and ways for students to become
> > involved.  Oh, and there
> > will be pizza, too.
> >
> > ============
> >
> > My own feeling is that *information* is not
> > countable in the normally-used
> > sense.  *OED* lists several uses where it is
> > countable, but they are all either
> > 'Obs.' or legal usage;  *Merriam-Webster* doesn't
> > list it as countable at all.
> > Google and Google Groups hits for "an information"
> > are almost all "an
> > information x", of course, where *information* is
> > used attributively and *x* is
> > *superhighway*, *specialist* or something.  Of the
> > five hits in the top hundred
> > of each search where *information* is genuinely
> > countable, four are probably
> > from non-native speakers of English and one is in a
> > legal sense.
> >
> > I know that *information* is countable in French;
> > I'm reliably informed that it
> > isn't in Spanish.  I'm tempted to ascribe these
> > countable uses of the word in
> > English to non-native error (the University message
> > above wasn't signed, so I
> > can't tell who wrote it), but I wonder whether
> > people here have come across the
> > use in native English.
> >
> > Damien Hall
> > University of Pennsylvania
>
>
>=====
>James D. SMITH                 |If history teaches anything
>South SLC, UT                  |it is that we will be sued
>jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com     |whether we act quickly and decisively
>                                |or slowly and cautiously.
>
>
>
>
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