The “volcano theory”. The case of collective nouns involving animal groupings

Abstract

The aim of this article is to study “collective” nouns (i.e. of the type a gaggle of geese) in English in order to account for the remarkable creation of new expressions that this type generates. My hypothesis is that it is a pattern for lexical innovation as there seems to be boundless imagination in the association of N1 and N2.The first section is about the distinction between “classifiers” and “quantifiers” and about the difference between a “strict” quantifier (a pound of) and an “approximative” one (a drove of pigs), which gives an idea of size based on the common experience of speaker and co-speaker.The second section provides an account of nouns referring to groups of animals. Looking back at the way these nouns were created in the fifteenth century and more specifically at Dame Juliana Berners’s The Boke of St Albans (1486) proves crucial as the motivation for the coining of new expression can thus be better understood.A brief comparison with French shows that even if some productivity can be detected, the pattern has not been as fully used as it has in English.My hypothesis is that, based on a generic pattern (in the case studied “a N1 of N2”/ “un(e) N1 de N2”), lexical innovation is limitless. Syntactic and semantic analyses are however not sufficient: social, historical and anthropological parameters have to be considered in order to explain choices and constraints on productivity.