Gardelle, Laure. Semantic Plurality: English Collective Nouns and Other Ways of Denoting Pluralities of Entities. John Benjamins, 2019. 215 pages

Abstract

This volume provides an unprecedented, comprehensive account of and consistent gradient of construal for the various means of expressing lexical-level (bunch, clothes) and discourse-built (every car) semantic plurality in English, with a focus on the delimitation of the category of ‘collective nouns.’ Moving away from the traditional reliance on the variable agreement patterns of collective nouns to focus on their construal of the plurality, Gardelle’s study proposes not only a consistent characterisation of this class of semantically plural nouns as wholes of highly integrated units but also accommodates, by comparison, looser ways of integrating units in a plurality such as ‘aggregates’ (furniture, these crew), which denote classes and whose starting point of the construal is the plurality, and ‘groupings’ (sheep, lots of students), where the units are more highly individuated, among others.