LINGUIST List 2.578

Fri 27 Sep 1991

Disc: Of Mice and Mouses

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

  • David E Newton, RE: 2.575 Mice and Mouses
  • Stephen P Spackman, Re: 2.575 Mice and Mouses
  • Jean Veronis, Re: Mice and Mouses
  • Steve Pinker, Of Mice and Men

    Message 1: RE: 2.575 Mice and Mouses

    Date: Fri, 27 Sep 91 17:55 BST
    From: David E Newton <DEN1vaxb.york.ac.uk>
    Subject: RE: 2.575 Mice and Mouses
    In my experience, I always use the plural "mouses" when referring to pointing devices, and "mice" for rodents. As far as I was aware, this was the semi-official (ie, widely-adopted) use of the terms. Maybe I was wrong, since other writers have maintained that they have never heard "mouses" in their own academic community. I had likened the pair (though the correlation is not identical) to the "goose/geese" ^ "mongoose/mongooses" example that most people know. That is to say, people who weren't au fait with the mongoose might (accidentally) use "mongeese" and, similarly, those who did not have regular contact with computing equipment might use "mice". The comment from Bill Poser that the adoptation of the "-en" suffix for various items in the computing world makes him doubt the "-s" plurals of "mouses" seems to me to be flawed. If this was the case, surely the usage of "mousen" would be seen. (Though I have to say that I have never seen as wide usage of "-en" forms as he mentions.) Thanken David E Newotn den1uk.ac.york.vaxa

    Message 2: Re: 2.575 Mice and Mouses

    Date: Fri, 27 Sep 91 11:20:43 -0500
    From: Stephen P Spackman <stephentira.uchicago.edu>
    Subject: Re: 2.575 Mice and Mouses
    Coming from anglophone Montreal (at least as far as technojargon is concerned), I have: mouse mice (freeroving pointing inperiph) VAX VAXen (DEC mini) box boxen (_generic_ computer, NOT box, "case, chassis") Amiga Amigae (this may have been my own coinage, once) BIXer BIXen (holder of a BIX account) and, yes, spouse spice (perhaps superseded by S.O., which doesn't seem to HAVE a plural ("people"?), though SOx ("esoks") suggests itself) But: Atari Ataris ST STs Mac Macs PC PCs Short words for things regarded with affection (thus ruling out Macs in my CLIdriven crowd :-) seem to be the best candidates for innovated irregular plurals. Bill Poser reports Chipmunk/Chipmunken, Macintosh/Macintoshen, BLIT/BLITzen. I haven't heard any of these, but I'd predict that BLIT/BLITzen would catch on like wildfire, while the others would be unacceptable (perhaps they are already too long?). But I'd go for "Macintish"! stephenestragon.uchicago.edu (stephenconcour.cs.concordia.ca)

    Message 3: Re: Mice and Mouses

     Date: Fri, 27 Sep 1991 12:39 EST
    From: Jean Veronis <VERONISVASSAR.BITNET>
    Subject: Re: Mice and Mouses
    The mice/mouse problem seems to indicate a difficulty of speakers to use irregular plurals when they use words in a new sense. I have heard a student explaining (in French) that his programs were generating "des fichiers journals" (=journal files, instead of "journaux"). I wonder if this is the historical reason why we have words with several plurals: "ciel" (sky) -> "cieux" in general, but "ciels" in painting, to refer to the sky in a painting "travail" (work) -> "travaux" in general, but "travails" when it means a particular tool for a horsesmith. I wonder also if other languages have this type of phenomenon.

    Message 4: Of Mice and Men

     Date: Fri, 27 Sep 91 13:30:58 EDT
    From: Steve Pinker <stevepsyche.mit.edu>
    Subject: Of Mice and Men
    Ellen Contini-Morava writes: |With respect to "mouses" (computer) vs. "mice" (rodent). Note that |the plural of "walkman" is walkmans", not "walkmen". On the other |hand, the plural of workman" is "workmen". The irregular plurals |seems more closely tied to the original, literal meaning, whereas the |newer, more metaphorical meaning allows the more productive plural. This claim is common in the linguistics and psycholinguistics literature, but it is not correct. Note: chessmen/*chessmans, metrical feet/*foots, the teeth/*tooths of the saw, Freud's intellectual children/*childs, leaves/*leafs of the book', etc. Among verbs, you find cut/*cutted a deal, blew/*blowed him off, the movie stank/*stinked, he caught/*catched a cold', etc. There are literally hundreds of such counterexamples. More quantitatively, Kim et al. (1991) elicted ratings of regularizations of novel senses of irregular verbs, and independent ratings of semantic centrality of the novel sense relative to the original one. Semantic centrality had no unconfounded effect whatsoever. The causal factor in regularization is not metaphoricity but *headedness* of words in the sense of Williams and others, as was first proposed by Kiparsky in pre-Lexical Phonology days. A derived word is only irregular if it has an irregular head; if not, the regular rule generally takes over as the default. Thus, instances of regularization virtually always involve words that contain an irregular root that does not serve as its head, that is, whose semantic referent, syntactic category, and other features are not inherited by the word as a whole. The reason that such words regularize is that irregularity acts like just any other grammatical feature, and percolates (or fails to percolate) from the root to the whole word via the same pathway. Examples thus include bahuvrihi compounds like 'walkmans, low-lifes, still-lifes, Bigfoots', where the referent of the root is not the referent of the compound (e.g., a low-life is not a kind of a life); regularization-through-derivation examples like 'flied- out, grandstanded, ringed the city with artillery', where the syntactic category of the root (noun or adjective) differs from the whole word (verb); nouns from names ('Toronto Maple Leafs, Renault Elfs, the Mickey-Mouses in this administration'), and nouns from phrases. Many headless derived forms also happen to be nonliteral, and this is what led to the impression that metaphoricity triggers regularization, but examples like 'chessmen' and 'caught a cold', and Kim et al.'s data, show unambiguously that headlessness (exocentrism) is the causal factor. The 'computer mouse' case is unclear, beginning with the phenomenon itself. Obviously there is widespread squeamishness about 'mice' but apparently not enough to allow 'mouses' to dominate. 'Mouses' is rare in speech, and in an survey of a thick catalogue of computer mail-order ads, we found that 16 used the heading 'mice', none used 'mouses', and 6 copped out and used the singular 'mouse'. We suspect that this case (and a family of related examples) is a different, weaker phenomenon, whereby irregular plurals, since their morphological idiosyncrasies force them to be stored in memory rather than generated by rule, tend to have noncompositional semantic representations, specific to the way in which that referent usually comes in bunches, rather than compositions of the root-meaning with generic plurality -- thus `mice' may well have a collecive sense that e.g. `dogs' does not. A novel sense of an irregular noun that invites a different flavor of plurality (collective, distributive, dual, etc.) is liable to feel uncomfortable when used with the existing irregular plural form; e.g., if 'mice' refers not just to "more than one mouse" but to something connoting a swarm or infestation, it will clash somewhat with pointing devices, which are encountered one at a time. But there is no structural constraint blocking the irregularity, so the phenomenon manifests itself more as minor discomfort than outright ungrammaticality triggering regularization. For discussion of the interaction of irregularity and plural subtype, see Peter Tiersma, "Local Markedness," Language, 1980. Finally, a warning about 'vaxen, bigna', and even `(computer) mice' as linguistic data. Dreaming up witty analogical extensions of irregular morphology is a lively genre of mirth, e.g., 'I got schrod at Legal Seafood'; Richard Lederer's "Foxen in the Henhice" from Crazy English; Maggie Sullivan's 'Nothing had subdone him like her violet ideas subdid him', and so on. The humor, of course, lies exactly in the leap away from grammar. Steve Pinker John J. Kim Alan Prince See: John J. Kim, Steven Pinker, Alan Prince, and Sandeep Prasada (1991). ``Why no mere mortal has ever flown out to center field,'' Cognitive Science, 15, 173-218. Steven Pinker, et al. ``Of mice and men,'' In preparation. Edwin Williams (1981) ``On the notions `Lexically Related' and `Head of a Word,' LI 12, 245-74.