Group Terms in English: Representing Groups as Atoms

What do terms such as the committee, the league, and the group of women denote? Pretheoretically, group terms have a dual personality. On the one hand, the committee corresponds to an entity as ideosyncratic in its properties as any other object; for instance, two otherwise identical committees can vary with respect to the purpose for which they were formed. Call this aspect the group-as-individual. On the other hand, the identity of a group is at least partially determined by the properties of its members; for instance, a committee will be a committee of women just in case each of its members is a woman. Call this aspect the groupas-set. Elaborating on suggestions in Link (1984) and Lasersohn (1988), I propose that group terms in English denote atomic individuals, that is, entities lacking internal structure. In particular, it is not possible to determine the membership of a group by examining the denotation of a group term. The proposed account correctly predicts that group terms systematically behave differently semantically (as well as syntactically) from plurals such as the men and conjunctions such as John and Bill. Thus the atomic analysis advocated here stands in sharp contrast to previous proposals, including Bennet (1975), Link (1984), and Landman (1989), in which group terms are considered of a piece semantically with plurals and conjunctions. Additional arguments come from the use of names of groups as rigid designators, from the parallel between group nouns and measure nouns, and from the distribution of group terms across two dialects of English. 1 CHARACTERIZING GROUP TERMS 1.1 A syntactic diagnostic Since the prototypical group term contains a group noun, we should begin by characterizing the class of group nouns. All group nouns happen to be morphologically regular with respect to plural marking, so only nouns which take the plural are candidates for group noun status. For instance, we have group/groups, committee/committees, and army/armies. Since only count nouns take the plural morpheme, group nouns are a proper subclass of the count nouns. A count noun will be a group noun just in case it can take an of phrase containing a plural complement, but not a singular complement. 70 Group Terms in English: Representing Groups as Atoms 1. a. the group of armchairs b. one committee of women c. an army of children 2. a. *the group of armchair b. "one committee of woman c. *anarmy of child 3. a. *the table of woods b. *one ball of yarns c. *a piece of cookies 4. a. the table of wood b. one ball of yarn c. apiece of cookie We can call this use of of group-noun of. These examples show that group, committee, and army are group nouns, while table, ball, and piece are not. Care must be taken with this test, however. There are count nouns which are not group nouns but which can take an of phrase with a plural complement, as in (5). 5. a. a picture of horses b. an ocean of tears 6. a. a picture of a horse b. an ocean of water However, the fact that these nouns also take of phrases with singular complements as in (6) distinguishes them from group nouns. Some nouns succeed or fail as group nouns according to which of several senses is intended. 7. a. *the book of pages b. *the book of page 8. a. the book of matches b. *the book of match The examples in (7) suggest that book is not a group noun, but the examples in (8) involving a different but closely related sense of book clearly is a group noun. Now we can give a first approximation at giving a more precise definition of 'group': a group is an entity which is in the extension of a group noun. Note that this definition does not presuppose that a group entity is or is not atomic. In other words, a group is an entity which would be appropriate as the denotation of a definite description containing a group noun, such as the committee.