“Let me get my stuffs.” Pluralization, mass and countability in African varieties of English
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Date
2016-04-21
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Abstract
This lecture explores a phenomenon that has not only been controversially discussed in linguistics, but also in philosophy and psychology. A semantic-ontological mass-count distinction seems to be universal in all humans (Massam 2012), distinguishing between non-individuated mass entities such as liquids, and individuated objects such as cars or chairs. Further, psycholinguistic research has recently emphasized the importance of yet another category called “object-mass” items or “collectives” (Barner & Snedeker 2005; Li et al. 2009; Inagaki 2014). These are also central in the current project.
While the semantic mass-count distinction seems to be universal, its linguistic representation varies considerably across different languages. This causes difficulties in the acquisition and use of mass nouns in English by non-native speakers. In standard usage, English mass nouns cannot be pluralized (*furnitures), combined with indefinite determiners (*a furniture), or with numerals (*three furnitures). However, in many L2 Englishes of Asia and Africa these forms have been reported to be abundant (Baskaran 2008; Schmied 2006, 2008; Mesthrie & Bhatt 2008; Kortmann & Lunkenheimer 2013). Huber (2012) even suggests “plural mass nouns” to be a typically African English feature.
Drawing on the electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English, corpus data and psycholinguistic experiments, results from the current project show that the feature is not diagnostic of African Englishes and generally less frequent than anticipated (Mohr 2015 a, b; 2016). Moreover, certain (semantic) patterns can be found in the corpus data, although the use of plural mass nouns had generally been attributed to overgeneralization and simplification strategies in acquisition (Mesthrie & Bhatt 2008; Sharma 2012). Further, important differences between the African varieties under scrutiny (Kenyan, Tanzanian, Nigerian, Ghanaian and Tswana English) can be observed. In the lecture, the results from the corpus study will be presented, and an outlook on most recent results from fieldwork in spring 2016 will be provided.
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Seminar
Keywords
linguistics, philosophy and psychology, semantic-ontological, overgeneralization