Hi everyone,
It's a long and cherished tradition in linguistics to watch pressing current affairs
and take a sideways, abstract interest in some minutiae of the language involved. To
that grand tradition, let me add a new example! In Parliament yesterday, amid the
rumbling tumult over Brexit - specifically a discussion of anger pointed towards MPs
- the speaker John Bercow said: "None of you is a traitor; all of you are doing your
best."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEilAWI_TRk
It's an interesting prescriptive feature of Standard English that 'all' is plural but
'none' is singular, perhaps considered an abbreviation of 'not one'. The OED's
historical examples give a mix of plural...
1697 Dryden Ded. Georgics in tr. Virgil Wks. sig. 2 None have been so greedy of
Employments..as they who have least deserv'd their Stations. [comrades, represent!]
1749 H. Fielding Tom Jones III. ix. i. 310 None are more ignorant of them than
those learned Pedants, whose Lives have been entirely consumed in Colleges, and among
Books. [take that nerds!]
1887 E. C. Stedman Victorian Poets (ed. 13) 37 None but sentimentalists and
dilettanti confuse their prose and verse. [nerd counter-swipe! thwack!]
1865 E. Lynn Linton Lizzie Lorton II. 215 I mind when nin on 'us daur say bo til
a guse afore my mither. [I love this one so much]
a1963 ‘F. O'Connor’ Genius (1995) 44 None of her features was really bad. [what a
charmer; damned with faint praise!]
...and singular:
1677 Lady Chaworth in 12th Rep. Royal Comm. Hist. MSS (1890) App. v. 37 All from
Court say the House will infailibly sit, but none dares warrant how long. [nice
little comparison to yesterday's suggestion that Parliament should sit - gasp! - on
Saturday to work out Brexit]
1849 Macaulay Hist. Eng. I. iii. 389 None of these was published oftener than
twice a week. [nice example of comparative adjective 'oftener' before the fashion for
periphrastic 'more/less + [adjective longer than 2 or 3 syllables]' which became the
standard]
I've read all the OED's entries now (you're welcome!) and interestingly their sample
includes more plural than singular. For a more reliable sense of trends, Google's
Ngram search (of published books, 1800 to present) shows an interesting relationship
between "none were/are" and "none was/is": https://is.gd/lZkNc0. Plural forms
dominated almost twofold to begin with, but then started to decline around 1840.
Plural and singular reached parity in early C20, though the plural forms kept
declining, until plateauing mid-century. Meanwhile singulars tracked a jagged but
fairly steady course from 1800 until beginning a gradual and uninterrupted decline
from the mid-1960s (rebellious times!). Nowadays they're as close as they've been
since early C20.
Naturally the Ngrams corpus is limited to books. In doing all this I'm obviously
procrastinating shambolically from other things (apologies to anyone reading this who
is waiting for me to reply to some other email...), so I won't spend even longer by
trying to search less formal corpora. Anyone wanna have a go?
Anyway it's an interesting little detail of the long-lived Standard English debate,
that grand old gift that keeps on giving. It's perhaps also relatable to classical
variationist discussions of changes from above/below. For lecturing purposes, the
Youtube clip could give a handy illustration and window into the graph - and segue
into other corpus tools that I didn't look at here. Enjoy!
Dave
--
Dr. Dave Sayers, ORCID no. 0000-0003-1124-7132
Senior Lecturer, Dept Language & Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä,
Finland | www.jyu.fi
Honorary Research Fellow, Cardiff University & WISERD | www.wiserd.ac.uk
Communications Secretary, BAAL Language Policy group | www.langpol.ac.uk
[log in to unmask] | http://jyu.academia.edu/DaveSayers
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