plural people

[Mark A. Mandel]

The usage is routine, and not just with personal names. In one of the
projects I work on (http://projects.ldc.upenn.edu/LCTL/), the work includes
tagging named entities of various kinds, including company names. The
guidelines specify as an exception:

>>>

Generic names that do not refer to a specific entity should not be tagged

        the Campbell Soups of the world (no markup)

<<<



I have also given the annotators (invented) examples of this type of
exception with personal names and location names:

>>>

PER:
   History records that the world has always had too many Stalins and too few
Gandhis.


LOC:
[assuming a news article about something happening in a small town called
Perryville:]

   There are hundreds or thousands of Perryvilles, but we never read about
most of them.

[That is, this sort of thing happens frequently in small towns, but ...]

<<<

Does anyone find these sentences strange?


-- Mark A. Mandel
    Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org