Re: Missing Singulars

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

>
> On 2008-12-19 09:13, Brian M. Scott wrote:
>
> > Unlike 'sand', 'milk', etc., it takes a plural verb: 'the
> > cattle are in the barn'.
>
> It's a collective plural sensu stricto, the clearest example of one in
> English. <snip> ... <police> functions like a count plural rather
> than a collective (it can be used with numerals, while <cattle> can't).

The prohibition against using numerals with <cattle> is news to me. I
got 12,900 raw Google hits for '20 cattle', and this was number + noun
in most cases. I got 10,400 raw Google hits for 'five cattle', and a
bare majority were for number + noun, albeit sometimes part of a
compound number (e.g. <thirty-five [sic] cattle>), rather than
collocations such as <five cattle rustlers> or <one in five cattle>.
The phrase 'five head of cattle' got 5,600 hits, so the two
constructions are about equally common in writing.

Richard.