Roberts, Seren Haf, and Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole, “Talking of objects: how different are Welsh and English nouns?”, Journal of Celtic Linguistics 14 (2012): 67–85.
- journal article
Welsh structure differs from English with regard to object references. English emphasizes individuation, making a clear distinction between singular and plural reference. In Welsh, however, the complex number marking system makes the number reference of nouns much more opaque allowing a much stronger emphasis on collections than in English. While evidence suggests that learning collective nouns is difficult, this may relate to English speakers specifically because the structure of English emphasizes individuals. The basic forms of some Welsh nouns refer to collections and modified with a unit ending to individuate one from the collection (e.g. coed 'trees' versus coeden 'tree'). Such differences may have both cognitive and linguistic consequences. This study examines noun type distributions in Welsh and English to determine the extent to which the two languages differ with regard to number reference. Samples of the most frequent nouns in Welsh and English texts, with their type and token frequencies, were classified into different noun categories. The results showed a strong similarity across the two languages for some noun types (e.g. singular/plural nouns and collective nouns). However, an additional collection/unit classification in Welsh accounted for 2.5% of all noun types, with collection forms occurring almost as often as unit forms. Where plural forms accounted for 25.4% of noun tokens in English, very few plural forms were used in Welsh (1.25%). The opacity of number reference in Welsh may have important effects on the way Welsh-speaking children learn their language and thus impact on the theories of language acquisition.
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