summary: John 'n them, John's mob, etc.

[David Gil]

Dear all,

Last week I posted the following query:

"This query is about dialects of English which have associative 
non-singular constructions of the form /John 'n them/ or /John's mob/.  
(This is actually just an amplification of "Question 1" in my previous 
message on associatives dated 28 November.)  My question is:  in 
constructions of the form

(1) John 'n them have gone home
(2) John's mob have gone home

can the subject NP refer to exactly two persons (ie. John and one of his 
friends), or must it necessarily refer to three or more persons (ie. 
John and at least two of his friends)?"

Results:

For constructions such as (1), three respondents, representing 
"Toronto", "Texas" and "SE Australia" dialects respectively, were 
unanimous that the NP could only refer to three or more persons.

For constructions such as (2), there was a split:  one respondent 
reported that in the "SE Australia" dialect the NP could only refer to a 
large number of persons (more than three), while another respondent said 
that in "Australia" it could refer to three or more persons; the latter 
respondent also reported that in Kimberly Aboriginal English, /John mob/ 
could -- probably, this needed to be checked with a native speaker -- 
also refer to two people, eg. John and his wife.

Discussion:

For (1), it seems clear that the pronoun /them/ retains its independent 
plural force in the associative construction, unlike in Papuan Malay, 
where the corresponding /John dong/ 'John 3PL' has undergone 
grammaticalization, and may refer to just two persons.  Accordingly, 
whereas /John dong/ is both associative and inclusory, its English 
counterpart, /John 'n them/, is associative but not inclusory -- the 
reference of /them/ does not contain John.

For (2) there seems to be a cline of grammaticalization, with the 
semantics of /mob/ being gradually bleached from 'lots' to 'three or 
more' to 'two'.

Thanks:

Claire Bowern, Matthew Dryer, Nick Enfield, Robert van Valin

-- 
David Gil

Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany

Telephone: 49-341-3550321 Fax: 49-341-3550119
Email: gil at eva.mpg.de
Webpage:  http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/