Abstract
This chapter reports the results of an investigation into adjectival modification of measure nouns in a corpus of English. The data shed light on the relationship between various subcategories of measure nouns and ‘ordinary’ nouns on the one hand, and on the semantics of the adjectives themselves, on the other.
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Notes
- 1.
See Solt (2015) for an overview of these approaches.
- 2.
While the number-neutral tag is rare for common nouns, in combination with the ‘unit of measure’ tag it most frequently returned to the specific word percent. This item is exceptional among measure nouns in English in not exhibiting plural marking, and it also proved to be something of an outlier with respect to adjectival modification, occurring quite frequently with adjectives such as large, average, higher, and highest. I leave further investigation into this and other proportional measures such as fractions to future work.
- 3.
These ten nouns are: cup glass, bottle, can, box, crate, package, teaspoon, tablespoon, and jar.
- 4.
Because container nouns deal in volume, the measure noun usage that is of interest to this study is most salient in partitive and pseudopartitive structures measuring quantities of physical entities, as in three cups of water.
- 5.
It is likely that the slightly lower rate in comparison to other classes of measure nouns is attributable to the availability, for many of the pseudopartitives caught in the search, of the individuating readings on which container nouns denote the containers themselves are objects and on which they are therefore expected to behave like common nouns.
- 6.
An additional category which I do not discuss here is expletives: in particular the words measly and lousy co-occur with all three types of measure nouns at higher rates than they do with nouns overall, while fucking and damn occur at higher rates with container nouns.
- 7.
Examples (3), (4), (5), (7), and (8) are taken from COCA (Davies 2008–).
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Uli Sauerland and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript, and to Stephanie Solt for introducing me to the ways in which corpus data can inform semantic research. All errors are of course my own. Work on this project was supported by DFG-grant CRC1412, project A5.
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Wilson, E.C. (2022). Modification of Measure Nouns. In: Gotzner, N., Sauerland, U. (eds) Measurements, Numerals and Scales. Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73323-0_18
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