Grammatical Number in English and Czech Nouns Master’S Diploma Thesis

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Bc. Radka Petrlíková Grammatical Number in English and Czech Nouns Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Naděžda Kudrnáčová, CSc. 2016 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor doc. PhDr. Naděžda Kudrnáčová, CSc. for her guidance, patience and valuable advice. Table of Contents 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 1 2. Grammatical Number ............................................................................................................. 4 2.1 Number in English ............................................................................................................ 9 2.2 Number in Czech ............................................................................................................ 12 3. Countability ........................................................................................................................... 15 3.1 Countability in English ................................................................................................... 20 3.2 Countability in Czech ..................................................................................................... 30 4. Agreement ............................................................................................................................. 36 5. Analysis of Uncountables .................................................................................................... 39 5.1 Uncountables .................................................................................................................. 39 5.2 Hypothesis ....................................................................................................................... 39 5.3 Method ............................................................................................................................. 40 5.4 Corpus of Uncountables ................................................................................................ 43 5.5 Results ............................................................................................................................. 54 6. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 70 Sources of Uncountable Nouns ............................................................................................... 74 References ................................................................................................................................. 76 Resumé ....................................................................................................................................... 80 Resumé ....................................................................................................................................... 82 1. Introduction This thesis discusses the grammatical categories of number and countability. It compares the systems of classifying nouns according to these categories in English and Czech. It is especially focused on the differences in countability between English nouns and their Czech equivalents. Even though the thesis is especially concerned with countability, the title is Grammatical Number in English and Czech Nouns, because some linguists do not treat countability as an independent category, and in some grammars it is discussed in chapters on number. The grammatical number is discussed briefly. There are many sources dealing with number in various languages. Therefore I only give a brief overview of what grammatical numbers may exist in a language in general, which of them are relevant for English and Czech, and by what means they are indicated in each of the languages. In addition, some peculiarities of each language are mentioned, such as the irregular plurals or the residuals of the dual number. The discussion of countability is more detailed, as there seems to be a greater variability among various sources. Many English grammar books present the traditional binary model of countables and uncountables. However, some recent grammars and linguistic articles challenge this model and show that many nouns may be both countable and uncountable, depending on a given context. In Czech the category of countability has only started to be mentioned in recent years. Traditional grammars only mention some peculiar groups of 1 nouns that are either only singular or only plural, when discussing the category of number. A very brief chapter of this thesis describes the rules for agreement in number among sentence elements in English and Czech. The second part of this thesis is an analysis of English uncountable nouns and their Czech equivalents. As Corbett (1994) says, there has already been done some research of uncountable fruit and vegetables in Slavonic languages (p. 204), Cummins (1991) presents his research in the field of Czech uncountable toponyms and Vavrušová (1984) selected all the uncountable nouns beginning with “d” and “v” that she found in an English dictionary, and tried to find their uncountable Czech equivalents. I collected my sample nouns from existing English grammars, in other words, I work with those examples of uncountable nouns that are most cited by linguists and therefore seem to be either the most common or the most interesting. Countability may differ across languages, and therefore, what is countable in one language may be uncountable in another. The aim of this thesis is to find both countable and uncountable Czech equivalents to English uncountable nouns. This may be useful for teaching English to Czech learners, who sometimes try to use English uncountables countably, because their Czech equivalents are countable. Furthermore, the proportion of nouns that correspond in countability in the two languages, and those that do not, may show the extent to which the grammatical category of countability reflects the extra-linguistic reality, and to which it is arbitrary. 2 Finally, the possible differences among various varieties of English (British, American, Canadian, Australian, etc.) are not taken into account in this thesis. The uncountable nouns analysed in the latter part of this thesis are uncountable at least in one of the varieties. 3 2. Grammatical Number Number is a grammatical category which is expressed by specific morphological means and reflexes semantic contents of a given word to some extent. However, the relation between grammatical number and extra-linguistic reality is disputable. According to Erhart (2001), number is related to the semantic category of quantity (p. 64). Komárek (1986) explains that its three functions are reflective, cognitive and structure-making (p. 42). Dušková (1994) says that it is a semantic category as well as a grammatical one (p.36). Even though grammatical number does often reflect extra-linguistic reality, it is not always that simple. Štícha (2013) argues that number has become grammaticalized and rather abstract. He maintains that the semantic opposition of singularity and plurality is not the same as the simple quantitative opposition of one object and more than one (p. 302). Čechová (1976) strictly distinguishes between the grammatical number of a given word and its semantic meaning. In her research, she found out that many Czech basic school pupils make mistakes in determining grammatical number of nouns because they confuse grammatical number with the actual quantity of the objects to which the nouns refer, which is a flaw that should be avoided (pp. 72-82). Therefore we can speak about a difference between notional and grammatical number. As Humphreys and Bock (2005) explain, “Notional number is the numerosity of the subject’s referent in the speaker’s mental model, and grammatical number is the conventional linguistic number of the subject (head) noun” (p. 689). An example of such a discord between grammatical number and the number of objects referred to are collective nouns, which are discussed later in this thesis. 4 An argument speaking for number’s ability to reflect extra-linguistic reality is the fact that it exists in various languages, which is not true of some other grammatical categories which are specific only to a limited number of languages. There is a need to express the quantity of referents of a given word even in those languages where the category of number does not exist, in such cases it is expressed lexically, for example by numerals. Erhart (2001) says: “Jestliže jsou jisté kvantitativní vztahy označovány přímo na slovech označujících substance (pomocí afixů), můžeme v daném jazyce mluvit o gramatické kategorii čís1a” [“If certain quantitative relations are marked directly on words referring to substances (by means of affixes) we can speak about the grammatical category of number in a given language”](p. 64). However, as Corbett (1994) explains, “the expression of grammatical number varies from relative simplicity in some languages to great complexity in others” (p. 201). He gives a comprehensive overview of possible typological classification of number. Corbett’s (1994) first division of number is in nominal and verbal. The difference between them is in what they quantify, not in where they are marked.

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