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ISSN : 2241-4665
Ημερομηνία έκδοσης: Αθήνα 27 Ιουνίου
2022
“The
Challenge of Teaching Collective Nouns to ESL Students”
Χανδρινός Κωνσταντίνος
Έκτακτος Επιστημονικός Συνεργάτης, Α.Ε.Ν./Α
Υποψήφιος Διδάκτωρ ΕΚΠΑ.
Abstract
Many grammarians view language as a
living organism consisting of different parts of which nouns are integral.
Nouns may have different forms /types, which sometimes can be confusing to ESL
students. This short article will focus on the type of nouns labeled as
collective nouns and discuss the fundamental aspects that may be challenging to
be comprehended by ESL students.
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The Challenge of Teaching Collective Nouns to ESL Students
We first of all need to identify the
collective nouns and the way they are used. The collective nouns are a
group/type of nouns named after their ability to designate collections of
individuals and include words such as family, police and Montreal. An interesting point is made by Vicky
Pagoulatos in her book, Functional Grammar, where she discusses the first
complex aspect for ESL students to master. To elaborate, a collective noun
requires a singular verb if the group is thought of as a unit and, on the other
hand, the collective noun requires a plural verb if the individuals that
compose the group are thought of and mentioned. (p.52) A good example is the
sentences:
1)
This is the best team I’ve ever seen.
2) Ottawa are playing against
Toronto next Sunday.
In this example the noun “team” is a
collective and it conjugates a singular verb, for we assume the whole team as
one group/unit. However, in the second example, the collective noun “Ottawa”
takes a plural verb, for we assume the individual players that are part of the
group.
In addition, Lori Morris in her
book, It’s a Long Story, makes an
interesting point concerning the number of collectives. She comments that the
number of the collective completely depends on the speaker’s or writer’s point
of view. Thus, collectives provide the speaker or the writer with the choice to
manipulate them as s/he wishes. In addition, Marianne Celce in her article,
“The Duality of Collective Nouns”, mentions a unique ability that only
collective nouns have and can express. The speaker or writer, by using
collective nouns, is able to imply two senses as s/he desires, one singular and
the other collective. (p. 166)
Another important aspect that may
cause some confusion to ESL students is the double power of the collective
nouns. In other words, as it is mentioned in the above examples, collective
nouns can be either singular or plural without changing their form like
traditional nouns. This may be a problem because as Marianne Celce argues in
her article if the number of the collective is restricted to “sentence level”,
then those sentences that carry simple past verb forms or modal auxiliaries
will not provide the reader or listener with any indication of the number of
the collective. In order to elucidate
her point she uses the following examples:
1) The
class didn’t quieten down.
2)
The government should rectify that mistake.
It appears there is a serious flaw
that may jeopardize communication and may confuse ESL students even more.
Nevertheless, Marianne Celce further in her article mentions that in these
instances the context or an “anaphoric reference” usually will provide a
solution to this problem. Discourse rarely happens in single sentences;
therefore, the extensions or context of the above mentioned examples will
reveal the number of the collectives:
1) The class didn’t quieten down,they were in a
bloisterous mood.
2) The government should rectify
that mistake if it can. (p.164-165)
Now let’s consider the sentence:
Montreal is/are having a bad season. What should it/they do about it? ESL
students may have problems understanding what message these sentences attempt
to transmit or whether they are grammatically correct. Interestingly, the noun
“Montreal” belongs to a special group labeled as proper or “unique” collective
nouns. Marianne Celce in her article argues that when a speaker or writer utilizes
a singular syntactic construction, then the city is viewed as a whole and an “inanimate
concept” is being expressed. On the other hand, when a plural syntactic
construction is utilized, then the “individual people” that are part of the
city are assumed and an “animate concept” is being expressed. (p.167) Thus,
once ESL students comprehend that the singular or plural choice signals a
different meaning, then they may have no further difficulty understanding the
concept that a sentence with a proper collective noun assumes.
Another aspect of collectives that
may cause difficulty to ESL students is the contradiction of number between the
collective and the verb. Walter Hirtle in his article, “The Singular Plurality
of Verb Discord in English” provides an appropriate example:
1) How a people die. (p.47)
In this example, he says that the
article “a” signifies the noun “people” as a singular, but the verb without the
“-s” ending appears to be plural; therefore, there is a clear contradiction
between the verb and its subject. (p.47)
How is it possible for the noun to be singular and plural at the same
time? First, we have to consider this
example on the lexical level. In This sentence the writer may wish to emphasize
the sense of the individuals in the group perishing one by one; therefore, the
morphology of the noun has to be such in order to express unity and at the same
time give emphasis to individuals that compose that particular group. The only
noun type that has that dual power is the collective noun and even though on
the surface it appears the number of the noun may disagree with the number of
the verb, in reality, the one complements the other in order to create this
unique semantic effect.
In addition, Walter Hirtle, in his
article provides an even more scientific explanation of a possible concord
between the verb and a collective noun. He says:
Because the number of the
substantive and that of the noun
the phrase [may] arise at different
moments, the possibility of each having
a different number is
introduced and, by the same token, a ground
for reasoning the apparent
contradiction is provided......the discord
arises not between verb and
subject noun phrase, but between the
noun phrase and its
substantive. (p.51)
To conclude, there is a plethora of
aspects of the collective nouns that may be difficult to be understood not only
by ESL students but also by native speakers. Nevertheless, collective nouns are
among the more colorful contributors to the English language and possess unique
abilities that may be useful when a speaker or writer wishes to express complex
notions and/or ideas.
Bibliography
Celce, Marianne. “The Duality of
Collective Nouns”. English Language
Teaching.
V.25,
No.2, p.164-169, 1970.
Hirtle, H. Walter. “The Singular
Plurality of Verb Discord in English”. Canadian
Journal
of Linguistics. V.27, No.1, p.47-54,1982.
Morris, Lori. It’s a Long Story. Unpublished material.
Pagoulatou-Vlachou, Vicky. Functional Grammar. Athens: Express
Publishing, 1986.
Hirlte, H. Walter. Number and Inner Space: A Study of
Grammatical Number in English. Quebec: Les Presses de l’ Universite Laval,
1982.
Michael, Ian. English
Grammatical Categories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
Schwarzschild, Roger. Pluralities. The Netherlands: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1996.
Wickens, A. Mark. Grammatical Number in English Nouns.
Philadelphia: John Benjamin’s
Publishing Company, 1992.
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