An Extra-Linguistic Study Analysis of Uncommon Pluralities

Before analyzing various patterns that occur within the sample group listed above, it is crucial that more demographic knowledge is divulged for each participant. Only then will some of the otherwise indistinct patterns, seem significant. The reason behind this, is many of the participants are related, and/or have spent a significant amount of time together. The concept that the language similarities amongst participants will ride the line of familiarity of the subjects is an example of extra-linguistic factors in action. Going from left-to-right in consultation with the provided table, we begin with the subject "Mom". My mother, Rosanne Green is a fifty-year-old white woman who was born into poverty, living in the projects of Dallas, Texas as a child, and made her way up socio-economically, to what many would consider upper-middle class. She completed high school, and went to Travel Agency training in her late teenage years, before getting married, moving to Kansas, and becoming a stay-at-home mom prior to her divorce. After she divorced my dad (the next participant listed) she worked her way into a successful career, where she is currently employed along with her second husband. "Dad" (participant two) is John Miller. He's a fifty-three-year-old white male who grew up on a farm outside of Osawotomie, went to Kansas State University to study Animal Husbandry, and ended up in construction sales. After a 10-year marriage to "Mom" he remarried, and had "Ashlynn," our third participant. Ashlynn is a high school senior in Johnson County, one who is bookish, and has had blue hair for 3 years (by choice, of course). She is my sister. Our fourth participant is David, my domestic partner. We've been together for two years. David took a ten-year sabbatical from higher education, and graduated from the University of Kansas School of Engineering in 2017, and is now gainfully employed. Similarly, his brother--our final participant--graduated with his Master's in Chemistry in 2016, and is now a college professor in Missouri.

Now that the relationships have been properly established, it's important to note the similarities and differences between participants one and two. The differences in the given answers can be attributed to a variation in education, while the similarities can be attributed to age and the former relationship the two shared. My mom believed the plural for syllabus was indeed, 'syllabus' because she had never encountered the word, whereas my father, a college graduate had, despite his similar age. Ashlynn, who is not yet in college was familiar with the word, and that can be attributed to her experience in a modern high-school setting in comparison to it having been thirty years since my mother was a student in a classroom. Thus, Ashlynn acts as our control-subject in this assertion. Another difference is my mom answering "hippopotamuses" to which she, herself attributed to her favorite Christmas song, "I Wanna Hippopotamus for Christmas" in which the -muses version is offered in a lyric. Furthermore, it seems that if my mom was unsure even in the slightest with her answer, she elected to provide me the singular version, assuming these tricky words followed the 'deer/deer' pattern. The similarity between their responses is showcased with the word antenna, as the two oldest subjects were the ones who used the -s form of pluralizing, while the younger participants opted for the scientifically preferred -ae pluralization.

The relation between father and daughter stands out in the response "fishes". Because we're a family of fishermen, Ashlynn would have had ample opportunity to mimic our father's preferred plurality of the word fish. In addition to that, they were the only two to respond with that usage, and it's the usage I also presumed was the most accurate. While my mother and sister are not related, nor do they see much of each other, they were the only two participants to use the -muses plurality of hippopotamus and to not use the -mi plurality of the word octopus, or the -i pluralization of the word syllabus, despite having themselves delivered differing answers for the latter two words. They are coincidentally, the only females I interviewed for this project, which if it says anything about gender, likely speaks more to the men's usage than it does the women's because for all three words, the men responded identically to each other.

By far, the most obvious pattern with relation to the participants themselves, is the duplication of answers given by two brothers, close in age, SES, and having lived together for a grand majority of their lives. Of all relations established amongst these five, David and James have likely come to know each other more than any one other person listed. Despite having been interviewed individually and separately, they responded the same. The fact that both men have pursued a career in the STEM field helps secure their answers, particularly with the word "foci", as they were the only two to use the more preferred version, but even that doesn't trump the significance of the shared geography, shared familial experience, and shared collegiate experiences these two brothers have.

Lastly, it's curious that the word in which all parties responded with the same pluralization usage was for the word nucleus. This could truly only be attributed to a similarity in required Biology courses at the highschool level, as no other occurrence of this fairly discipline-specific word is common in all five participants varying backgrounds. A few participants including David, made mention of that word being 'burned into [their] brains' in high school. Of all the words, the only other one to come close to having had 100% of the same response was the word ox, and perhaps the pluralizing usage of -en sticks out to many because of how uncommon a usage it is.

I was pleased to note a few different things about my choice in dictionaries. First, I was unaware that dictionaries typically list multiple forms of pluralization if indeed, many are used by the public. Of course, this shouldn't have been so shocking after having learned from Anne Curzan's TedTalk that dictionary editors are "just trying to keep up" with all of us speakers. I was also interested to find that for the most part, dictionary.com and the Eleventh Edition of Merriam Webster's Collegiate dictionary agreed on the varied usages, despite dictionary.com being updated on a continual basis, and this specific edition of the MWCD was published in 2003. In fact, the only noteworthy difference between the two listings were for the word ox, in which the MWCD listed "oxen or ox" as the plural form, and dictionary.com listed "oxen or oxes". Lastly, I was impressed, and somewhat surprised, that my participants were considerably in-line with both dictionaries. Three out of the five provided a listed pluralization for every answer given. With respect to that figure, it's important to note that the three that provided all listed answers were--by far--the most recently educated participants, the participant with the most unlisted answers was the most removed from education, and the other--my father, only acquiesced to the word "focal" after exclaiming, "How they hell can you have more than one focus?!" It is likely that his response was supposed to capture the idea of "focal points" in which the word points is pluralized, but it essentially means the same thing as having multiple foci.

Prior to my incorporation of the dictionaries for this project, I silently determined for myself when a participant was giving what I deemed a right answer, and a wrong answer. I knew going into the interview experience that the goal was not to determine rightfulness or wrongfulness, yet I ignored this foresight and made small judgements along the way--being sure not to clue my subjects into my thoughts about their responses. It's interesting to note that the only comparison I had to go off of to make my insignificant judgements, was what my own responses would have been, and yet--if we had been calculating rightfulness and wrongfulness, I, myself, would have provided a less correct--albeit still listed--pluralization for the word focus, as I originally presumed it to have been "focuses". You can imagine my shock when David casually threw out the word "foci", and I immediately yielded to his usage because in my mind, I've deemed him my academic superior. It's interesting how our opinions so vividly affect our desire to categorize each other. Because I know that this assignment was not to categorize, but to synthesize, this only makes for a funny, and self-reflective anecdote, but it does say something about humanity's tendency to sort people into often dichotomous groups.

Resources

“Anne Curzan: What Makes a Word ‘Real’?” Performance by Anne Curzan, TEDTalk, Mar. 2014.

dictionary.com

The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. 11th ed., Merriam-Webster, 2003.

Thank you to the following people for participating in this study, without whom this assignment would have not been possible: David Bryan, James Bryan, Rosanne Green, Ashlynn Miller, John Miller