The functional range of bare singular count nouns in English

Stvan, Laurel Smith

doi:10.1075/slcs.89.10stv

Cited by 44 publications

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“…Many works have examined bare nouns in a single position (e.g., Baldwin et al, 2006;Stvan, 1993Stvan, , 1998 on prepositional phrases; Borik & Gehrke, 2015;Stvan, 2007 on direct objects; Berezowski, 2009 on nominal predicates). Responding, then, to Question 3, we illustrate the distribution of each of the 15 most frequent BSCNs according to their position as subject, direct object or object of a preposition.…”

Section: What Is the Overall Distribution Of Bscns By Position?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a review and production task, students should work in groups with a prompt like the one in (8). There are another dozen institutional nouns that work this way in English (Stvan, 1998(Stvan, , 2007; students can discuss the same contrast with school, church, jail, campus, etc.…”

Section: )mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To show that more than just a handful of BSCNs exist, Table 1 lists examples from American English that make up one of the larger semantic subsets-social and geographical places-accounted for by Stvan (2007). These bare-form word types represent the complete attested set of location count nouns collected from naturally occurring English from the 19 th to 21 st centuries.…”

Section: Introduction To Bare Singular Count Nounsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Learning English bare singulars: Data in the L2 classroom

Stvan

John²

2016

E-JournALL

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ENContrasted with the more typical English bare noun forms of mass and proper nouns, bare singular count nouns comprise a problematic set for many descriptive grammars and thus for many second language learners. Although article usage is one of the trickiest areas of English as a Second Language (ESL) to master, bare noun phrases, and bare singulars in particular, are less emphasized in the English language classroom, where much of the focus is placed on learning to produce articles, not learning to exclude them. To investigate L2 sensitivity to bare singular forms, the distribution of bare and articulated NPs in corpus data is contrasted, nouns appearing most often without articles are tracked, and a survey of L2 grammaticality judgments by adult learners is gathered. Lastly, the combined results of the corpus and survey data are integrated into a lesson on the syntax and pragmatics of bare singular count nouns that is designed for the ESL classroom. Key words: BARE SINGULARS, ENGLISH ARTICLES, ESL, CORPUS ASSISTED LANGUAGE LEARNING, L1 LANGUAGE TYPES ES En contraste con las formas nominales indeterminadas del inglés tales como los sustantivos incontables y los nombrespropios, los sustantivos contables en singular suponen una dificultad en muchas gramáticas descriptivas y, por ende, para muchos aprendientes de L2. Aunque el uso del artículo es uno de los aspectos más difíciles en el aprendizaje del inglés como L2, las frases nominales no determinadas, en especial los sustantivos indeterminados en singular, no suelen recibir un tratamiento extenso en la clase de inglés, ya que la atención se centra en aprender a producir artículos, no en excluirlos. Con el fin de investigar la sensibilidad de los aprendientes de inglés L2 a las formas singulares indeterminadas de sustantivos ingleses, se contrasta la distribución de las frases nominales indeterminadas y articuladas en un corpus, realizándose un seguimiento de los sustantivos que aparecen con más frecuencia sin artículo, así como un estudio de juicios de gramaticalidad en aprendientes adultos de L2. Finalmente, los resultados combinados de los datos procedentes del estudio y del corpus se integran en una lección sobre sintaxis y pragmática de sustantivos singulares indeterminados diseñada para la clase de inglés como L2. Palabras clave: SINGULARES INDETERMINADOS, ARTÍCULOS DEL INGLÉS, INGLÉS COMO L2, APRENDIZAJE DE LENGUAS ASISTIDO POR CORPUS, TIPOS LINGÜÍSTICOS COMO L1IT I sostantivi non numerabili e i nomi propri che si presentano spogli, ovvero senza articoli o quantificatori, risultano piuttosto comuni in inglese. Al contrario, i sostantivi singolari spogli rappresentano un gruppo problematico per molte grammatiche descrittive e di consequenza per molti studenti di inglese L2. Sebbene l'uso dell'articolo sia una delle strutture più complesse da padroneggiare nell'inglese come lingua seconda/straniera (ESL), i sintagmi nominali (SN), e nello specifico quelli singolari, sono meno enfatizzati nei corsi di inglese, nei quali l'attenzione è posta sull'abi...

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Section: What Is the Overall Distribution Of Bscns By Position?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: )mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introduction To Bare Singular Count Nounsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Learning English bare singulars: Data in the L2 classroom

Stvan

John²

2016

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“…(3-5) und (3-6) (vgl. dazu Kiss 2007, Eisenberg 1999, fürs Englische Carlson et al 2006, Stvan 2007.…”

Section: Konstruktionen Mit Artikellosen Nomen Im Deutschenunclassified

„Podolski hat Vertrag bis 2007, egal, ob wir in der Ersten oder Zweiten Liga spielen.“

D’Avis¹,

Finkbeiner²

2013

Zeitschrift Für Germanistische Linguistik

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In German, singular count nouns usually are accompanied by a determiner (cf. Ich habe ein Auto, ‘I have a car’ vs. *Ich habe Auto, ‘I have car’). In recent years, however, the singular count noun Vertrag (‘contract’) is frequently used without a determiner, as in Er hat Vertrag bis 2013 (‘He has contract until 2013’). Although there is some doubt, intuitively, whether or not this construction is grammatically acceptable to native speakers, it definitely exists in today’s German. In this contribution, we examine the in-between status of the Vertrag+haben-construction in German in more detail. We try to find an answer to the following question: How can we explain that Vertrag haben, on the one hand, is less acceptable than the regular Hunger haben (‘be hungry’ [‘have hunger’]) but, on the other hand, is much more acceptable than *Auto haben (‘have car’)? In a diachronic corpus study on (Er) hat Vertrag, we show, first, that this construction is used in German newspaper texts since 1990 with increasing frequency. Then, in a short survey of the general distribution of determinerless count nouns in German, we show that Vertrag haben does not fall under one of the established classes of determinerless constructions in German. Against this background, we take a contrastive look at Swedish, which allows for a great variety of determinerless constructions (e. g., Han har bil ‘He has car’). More specifically, we discuss morpho-syntactic, semantic and information structural properties of Swedish determinerless constructions. Some of these characteristics turn out to be similar for Vertrag haben. The contrastive view leads us to the more general assumption that Vertrag haben is marked because of lacking morpho-syntactic licensing, in contrast to the relevant Swedish constructions. As an account of the problem of how Vertrag haben could achieve the status of a German construction to begin with, we propose that it is the semantic noun class of Vertrag, which we define as abstract, but countable noun, which contributes to the licensing of the construction.

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“…Regarding the zero article, its use in Standard English (StdE) is known to be more or less restricted to: (7) proper names, (8) non-count nouns (mass and abstract nouns), and (9) generic or kind-denoting plural nouns. Another use that has received attention in the literature concerns a circumscribed set of nouns naming social and geographical places such as church , school , and prison (see, e.g., Soja 1994 and Stvan 2007 for an inventory and discussion). These are frequently deployed as the complement of a prepositional phrase (PP) (Baldwin et al 2006), as in (10).…”

Section: Introduction: the Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

“They used to follow Ø river”: The Zero Article in York English

Rupp

Tagliamonte

2019

Journal of English Linguistics

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Speakers of York English (UK) use a zero article with definite singular nouns (e.g., “They used to follow Ø river”), which is impossible in Standard English. We probe the possibility that this form is a remnant from Old English, when there were no articles as they are currently found in Modern English, rather than a more contemporary development. We trace the diachronic trajectory of the zero article in historical-descriptive grammars and test social and linguistic constraints on its use in York English in a logistic regression analysis. The results show that information structure is a significant predictor of the zero article across all generations of the community and that the zero article is used in the same way as it was used as far back as Old English. However, it exhibits heightened usage among the older and younger generations, exhibiting a U-shaped curve. We suggest that this pattern demonstrates longitudinal maintenance of a conservative feature, which is suppressed in middle-age as the result of social pressures. In this way, this case study adds insight into the fate of dialect features in contemporary speech communities. It also highlights the importance of combining insights from different strands in linguistics for understanding the evolution of syntactic variants like the zero article.

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The functional range of bare singular count nouns in English

Cited by 44 publications

References 0 publications

Learning English bare singulars: Data in the L2 classroom

Learning English bare singulars: Data in the L2 classroom

„Podolski hat Vertrag bis 2007, egal, ob wir in der Ersten oder Zweiten Liga spielen.“

“They used to follow Ø river”: The Zero Article in York English

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