Re: Chinese-style measure words in English?

From: Lee Sau Dan (danlee_at_informatik.uni-freiburg.de)
Date: 12/30/04 

Date: 30 Dec 2004 10:19:29 +0800

>>>>> "Douglas" == Douglas G Kilday <fufluns@chorus.net> writes:

    Douglas> Some speakers do not recognize "data" as a plural and
    Douglas> construe it as a mass-noun, so instead of "5 more data"
    Douglas> they say "5 more pieces of data".

Or "5 megabytes of data", "1 year of data", etc.

It's quite useless to talking about quantities of without agreeing on
the unit of measure. And there is no natural unit of measure for
mass-nouns.

What's strange to me is that some nouns *do* have pretty natural
units, but are really mass-nouns in English. It was hard to learn to
use them correctly: paper (***), sand (grain), rice (grain),
furniture (piece), etc. You MUST use a classifier when quantifying
these nouns. So unintuitive.

    Douglas> No additional information is conveyed, but for these
    Douglas> speakers "pieces of" is syntactically obligatory.

I don't think so. "10 grains of sand" is very different from "10
kilograms of sand" is very different from "10 pounds of sand". 

-- 
Lee Sau Dan                     §õ¦u´°                          ~{@nJX6X~}
E-mail: danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
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