A Nifty Idea to Practice Not-So-Nice Nouns (i.e., Collective and Aggregate Nouns)

This activity is short and to the point with the opportunities to focus on meaning and form.

STEP 1 – [This may be done as solo work, and then students could share their ideas with a partner. Alternatively, this could be done as a class.] Complete the sentences with your own words.

1. The police search people’s homes if…
2. An athletic team is strong when…
3. Today data is stored…
4. A herd of cows needs…
5. In a court of law, the jury has the responsibility of…
6. At death, a person’s remains are often…
7. A family can be big or small. My family is…
8. A student committee is sometimes created in order to…
9. I feel that nuclear arms are…
10. In contrast with what was possible 10-15 years ago, communications today are…

STEP 2 – Identify the underlined words that have both a singular and plural form.

STEP 3 – For those nouns that have both a singular and plural form, change the underlined word to a plural noun and make any other necessary changes in the given sentence.

Got an idea for additional practice? Please share it.

Student Stumper 22: The Challenge of Identifying Collective and Aggregate Nouns

QUESTION: Why do we say “my family is” but “the police are”? Aren’t both words collective nouns?

ANSWER:  No. Both “family” and “police” refer to a unit, but we perceive the number of members in each one differently. Greenbaum and Quirk explain that “family” is a collective noun and “police” is an aggregate noun, the latter being a unit with an indefinite number of parts (1990). Other examples that make that distinction clearer are the aggregate nouns communications, media, and data. Contrast that with examples of collective nouns: committee, team, and jury. Greenbaum and Quirk identify collective nouns as “ordinarily singular” and aggregate nouns as “ordinarily plural” (1990). This is why we say “my family is” and “the police are”. Biber, Conrad, and Leech confirm that in American English collective nouns normally take the singular (2002).

Consider some other differences between collective and aggregate nouns:

• Use of determiners. We can use indefinite articles with collective nouns but not aggregate nouns: a committee, a team, a jury, a family. (But not: a communications, a media, a data, a police.)
• Singular and plural forms. In general, we can choose between two forms of a collective noun (team-teams, family-families), but we don’t have this choice with aggregate nouns (one police? two police?)

In my next posting, I’ll offer and idea or two for classroom practice.

For more information on this topic:

Georgia State University, Dept. of Applied Linguistics

The OWL at Purdue

References:

Biber, Conrad, and Leech. Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Pearson Education, 2002.

Greenbaum and Quirk.  A Student’s Grammar of the English Language. Longman, 1990.