From: Rick McCallister
Message: 62180
Date: 2008-12-19
> From: Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham@...>Yes, but your examples are all plural. Show me an example of "one cattle"
> Subject: Re: [tied] Missing Singulars
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Friday, December 19, 2008, 3:32 PM
> --- 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.