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Technology weirds language

I was a little surprised at how many students weren’t conscious of the fact that “software” is a plural noun with no singular.

It is possible to use “software” in such a way that it looks like a singular—the example one student gave was, “Software is hard”—but actually, it’s an object, not a subject in that case: “Selling software is hard.”

But companies can’t produce “a software.” They can produce “a software product” or “a software solution” or even “a software upgrade,” but not “a software,” just as you can’t walk into the nearest Home Depot and buy “a hardware.” (Nor, for that matter, can you buy “a linen” at Linens ‘n’ Things, as near as I can tell.)

I had previously thought this was a quirk of our students who aren’t native speakers of English, because they often have subject/verb number agreement difficulties, but it turns out some of our native speakers have this problem as well.

I also explained to them, last night, that pronouns are variables, and just like programs, their sentences will produce unexpected results if they aren’t careful about how they assign to those variables (or if the variables aren’t assigned before use.) I can never use that analogy again; I’ll never have another audience that will get it.

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Posted by pjm on November 29, 2006 10:35 AM |

Comments

i think you’re a closet english major at heart. just don’t go turning into mrs. lagner on us! :)

Posted by: nikki c | November 29, 2006 12:53 PM

Software, like many nouns, is almost certainly in the process of changing — too many people use it otherwise.

Pronouns are very context-dependent and quite rarely badly assigned. Children don’t do it right — they think you know what they’re talking about. And puns are a special case. But the vast majority of pronouns are used without any real world ambiguity.

Your post, looking carefully, has the final paragraph chock-full of possibly unassigned thems and theys (the first one, in particular, refers to a group you haven’t actually ever referred to as a group before), but it’s still comprehensible.

Posted by: wolfa | November 29, 2006 3:48 PM

I think the best pronoun analogy in programming is/are Perl’s “special variables” $_, @_, etc. You never have to assign to $_; it’s automatically assigned by what you’re doing. (Sometimes you don’t even need to call it; in Perl, shift with no arguments is valid code in some contexts.) But its value is dependent on what you’re doing, in a way that when you use it, you do have to be careful that it really means what you think it does. This is the problem my students have; using “they” in a context where there are multiple possible referents.

(Yes, I was aware of some ambiguity in my own pronoun use there; I was wondering if I’d be allowed to get away with it. Whatever “it” is.)

Posted by: pjm | November 30, 2006 3:31 AM

Does that mean one can’t say “this software” or “that software” but has to say “these software” or “those software”? One would really say “These software don’t run on my computer”? Or “These hardware don’t fit my sink”?

I would have said that such words might be plural or collective in sense but behave grammatically (and are grammatically) singular. For sure, “linen,” like “food,” is singular: “Good linen is expensive” (or “Good linens are expensive”), “Food is cheap in this country.”

Not taking “a” doesn’t mean a noun isn’t singular. If you refer, for example, to the discipline of history, you say “History is taught in all high schools.” This sense of the word doesn’t allow for “a,” though other senses do (“a history of asthma”), but it’s definitely still singular.

Posted by: Roslyn | December 1, 2006 9:10 AM

Roslyn—You’re probably right in that the singular software (“this software”) in your example denotes a collective. I think in a dictionary there would be multiple definitions (senses, like your “history” example) here, with the same word serving multiple purposes. There’s no sense of “software” which allows for “a software.” They all require that full stop to be removed, and “software” to be used as a modifier to some other noun.

Posted by: pjm | December 1, 2006 10:09 AM

“History,” a singular verb, can take “a” or not, depending on sense. But there are also plenty of singular nouns that don’t have a sense that allows of “a”: “humidity,” “mud,” “insurance,” etc. They are still singular nouns.

Believe me, though, I do defer to you on all things technological.

Posted by: Roslyn | December 1, 2006 11:16 AM

Me again. I meant “a singular noun,” not “a singular verb,” of course.

Posted by: Roslyn | December 1, 2006 5:46 PM

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