I'm dubious.

Elsewhere we cited to an article that reads thus, and we quoted part of it: A defective lexical item is one that lacks some of the forms normally exhibited by a lexical item of its class. For example, the nouns FURNITURE and HAPPINESS are defective, since they have no plural forms, while the nouns OATS and POLICE have no singular forms. And the verbs MUST and BEWARE both lack a number of the forms exhibited by most verbs.

Let's think about the claim that "oats" is plural. Is there any type of grain for which we use both a singular and a plural form? We speak of wheat, rye, rice, corn and barley, but not of "wheats" or "ryes" or "rices" or "corns" (except the kind on your feet) or "barleys". So too the word "sand" is never pluralized when used in the sense of the grainy item (we pluralize only in its metaphorical meaning [sands of time] or its meaning of "shoreline" [sands of the beach]).

We use the same form for the grain-words even when the context the context means a separate sample, and thus would call for a plural. Thus, though one "collect tissues from various patients," one collects "wheat [not wheats] from various fields" and "sand [not sands] from various beaches."

My thought is this kind of tangible thing cannot be conceived of as separate singular and plural entities. The choice of what verb-form to use with it, singular or plural, is arbitrary and conventionaly.

Interestingly, this article is very nearly the only google hit you can get for "defective lexical items" (or "item"). As best I can tell, its "importance" is simply this: a dictionary-writer usually faces multiple form of a single word and must decide which one to alphabize it. (E.g., is the base word "dog" and "dogs"; does it come before or after "doggeral"?) Granted, a few words have only one form, simply because the concept they refer to does not exist in multiple forms - but that hardly seems particularly significant, and it certainly doesn't make them "defective".

I think the author chose the term because it is used in classical (Latin) grammar: nouns that lack a plural or a singular are called defective. There are also two other anomolies in Latin: deponent verbs (i.e., they are medio-passive in construction but active in meaning) and suppletive verbs (i.e., some forms of the verb use different roots than others, e.g., in English 'to be' is a suppletive: am, are, is, was, were, been, be).

When talking about nouns and number, linguists often distinguish between count(able) nouns and mass and collective nouns. Count nouns are what we normally expect, nouns that have a plural form with a plural meaning. Mass nouns usually only have a singular form, but don't take the indefinite article, but rather 'some'. You talk about 'some sand' or 'some water'. What these nouns denote is some indivisble mass of stuff. Collective nouns denote a group of objects like fruit, but can have plural forms. 'Have a grape.' or 'Have some grapes.'

Dictionaries are often alphabetical lists of lemmatized lexical items (i.e, words. In English, nouns are usually listed by their singular form. Verbs by the infinitival without the 'to'. Lexical items that have regular forms usually do not list those forms, but irregular words do list as many forms as needed. In Latin, OTOH, nouns are listed in the nominative and genitive singular and the gender is indicated. From the genitive singular you can determine which declension the noun belongs to and how to decline it. Again, if there are irregular forms they are listed. Verbs are listed by first person present indicative and three other forms follow, infinitive, first person present perfect, and neuter perfect particple. From this, one can usually reconstruct the entire paradigm of forms.

Again, a very good book to read on lexicography as a discipline is: Ladislav Zgusta Manual of Lexicography, Mouton-Hague, 1971.

Nice discussion. Wordnerd, I don't think you'd take "tissues from patients;" I think it would be "tissue from patients." Now, a patient might use several "tissues" for his runny nose!

jheem, another new word for me was "lemmatized." Since it was only listed in one online dictionary, I didn't feel too bad not knowing it! Between you and aput....

BTW, where is aput? I wonder if he has had trouble logging in.

Yes I did have.

jheem is right: there's a fundamental grammatical difference between count and mass nouns, and most substances are mass nouns: water, wine, milk, air, sand, steel, wheat, rye, barley, chocolate. They take singular agreement while denoting large amounts of stuff. Normally the plural is not used, except that it can be in the sense 'different kinds of'. ('Chocolate' is also a count noun: two chocolates are not two different kinds.)

What's anomalous about plural 'oats' is that it's a grain, and all the other specific grain names as well as the generics 'grain' and 'corn' are mass nouns. There is no identifiable single thing an oat (is it the head? one of the grains in the head?), unlike with a pea; though we do use the uninflected form in compounds like oat-cake.

'Defective' is the standard term. They can be singulare tantum, singular only, as with abstracts such as 'friendliness', or plurale tantum, which cross-linguistically tend to include artefacts made as pairs (scissors, trousers) and diseases (measles, mumps). And note stem form in compounds again: trouser-leg, scissor-hold.

Glad to see you again, aput!

I hope your problems are now sorted. If you still get problems, post in this thread and someone will try to help.

wordnerd: Let's think about the claim that "oats" is plural. ... My thought is this kind of tangible thing cannot be conceived of as separate singular and plural entities.
aput: What's anomalous about plural 'oats' is that it's a grain, and all the other specific grain names are mass nouns. There is no identifiable single thing an oat, unlike with a pea.

It's indeed anomalous if you assume that 'oats' is plural -- but the anomaly ends once you question that assumption. What makes you assume that 'oats' is plural? Obviously the -s ending triggers that assumption, but there are plenty of words ending in -s that are not plurals.

Your note of the word 'peas' is especially relevant.

quote:

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etymology on-line: pea: "The modern singular form evolved from M.E. pease (pl. pesen), which was both single and collective (e.g. wheat, corn) but was mistaken for a plural."
(note: I seem to be having trouble making this link work; this one may help.)

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The number is given by agreement. 'Oats' is plural by most tests:

Wheat is grown in Canada.
Oats are/*is grown in Canada.

Wheat is grown for its nutritious grain.
Oats are/*is grown for their/*its nutritious grain.

Wheat has a hard outer husk.
Oats have/?has a hard outer husk.

So mostly 'oats' takes plural verbs and anaphoric 'they'. But note that in the following the crop can be treated as a collective singular, even when unquestionably a count plural:

Wheat is the biggest crop in Canada.
Oats ?is/?are the biggest crop in Canada.
Bananas ?is/?are the biggest crop in Canada.
Oranges ??is/?are the biggest crop in Canada.

It's probably because the verb is agreeing with 'crop' here, but I'm puzzled why bananas is more easily taken as collective than oranges!

"Bananas is"?? "Oranges is"?? Never.

Easiest solution is to reform the sentence into "The biggest crop in Canada is bananas (since they grow so well in Canada's famed tropical rainforests)"


Sidenote: For a while I was hung-up on the topic of words containing more vowels than consonants. Now it's interesting names for bands. Add to that list "Aput and the Canadian Bananas." (And how do you pronounce "Aput," anyway?)

["aput]

Now don't get started on my geography. My first attempts were things like 'Oats is noted for its brilliant yellow flowers', and I struggled hard to find even remotely plausible properties of crops I personally can tell from a draught horse seven times out of ten, in a good light.

aput: So mostly 'oats' takes ... anaphoric 'they'.

OK, what's 'anaphoric'?
[In over my depth here. Hhhhheeeeeellllllppppp!]

OK, what's 'anaphoric'?

Anaphora is what pronouns do. "I read the book, and it was terrible." "It" is used to refer to "the book". Compare cataphora: "It was silly having to read that book." Here it is used first, and its refgernce, "having to read that book", comes later.

Anaphora is also a term of rhetoric, meaning a repetition at the beginning of each of a group of parallel phrases: "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills." - Churchill.

The opposite of anaphora, in this sense, is not 'cataphora'; rather it is epistrophe. In epistrophe, the repetition comes at the end: "government of the people, by the people, for the people" - Lincoln.