[Lexicog] Re: lexical entries as singulars or plurals

[David Tuggy]

Another interesting bunch from the singular/plural standpoint is 
diseases. I understand that "pox" was originally? / at one time? a 
plural, essentially "pocks". Is/are "measles" a plural or not? Probably 
not for me. I would normally say "measles is dangerous" rather than 
"measles are dangerous". I would only use a singular "measle" as a joke. 
Same with "mumps", only more so. (???"He's got a mump on the right side 
of his face.") But "hives" is a plural. Yet I could certainly say "hives 
is an uncomfortable disease", or (less easily) "hives is uncomfortable", 
or "hives is a symptom of an allergic reaction", though I could equally 
well, or maybe better, use "are" in those sentences. You can talk about 
a singular "hive", though you don't hear it often (in that sense, of 
course. Singular bee hives are all over the place). "Shin splints" is 
also pretty strongly plural even though I don't think I've ever (till 
this sentence :-) ) talked about a single shin splint; "cramps" is 
almost completely plural; "shingles" much less so, and so on.

This is of course similar to the "potatoes" kind of plurals, where you 
can say "potatoes is/are one of my favorite foods". And that of course 
to other "grouping" cases like "ham and eggs is/???are one of my 
favorite foods."

Anybody remember the Far Side cartoon where a "sketchy" (= 
suspicious)-looking guy in a trench coat and dark glasses huddles over a 
table of jars of illicit substances: the creeps, the willies, the 
shakes, the heebie-jeebies, the fantods, and so forth. There's 
(there're) another interesting bunch of plurals, again closely related 
to the diseases.

Rudy writes (below) that for "sales" "the semantics don't work 
compositionally". I might have said "doesn't". Another singular/plural 
mess: the sciences. Physics is a singular, rhetorics would have to be 
plural, but maybe there's only one of them any more (i.e. for most 
speakers there is, or at least may be, rhetoric but not rhetorics), is 
mathematics or are they (or maths) a subject in school, and so forth. 

Anybody out there need some good dissertation topics?

--David Tuggy



Rudolph C Troike wrote:

>
> An interesting English example came to my attention while I was driving
> around town recently. "Sales" can be simply the plural of "sale", as in
> "I made two sales (of houses, cars, etc.) today", but I noticed it on
> a sign saying "Tucson Tire Sales", where the plural form indicates a
> place where something is sold. Also, more abstractly, it can be used
> as a field of work, as in "John is in accounting, Jim is in sales." It
> would seem difficult to treat these usages as just the simple plural
> of "sale", since the semantics don't work compositionally.
>
>       Rudy Troike
>
>
>
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