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COPYRIGHT 2004 Adam Mickiewicz University Press
ABSTRACT
Here are four notes concerned with related aspects of the morphosyntax of less in English. The first is concemed with (re-)drawing attention to the currency of a usage in which less is accompanied by a plural noun, as in the title of the article. The second aims to show that less and its ancestors are heads of a partitive construction, whether this is marked overtly or not. In the third note we are concerned with the explicit characterisation of the status of vatious determiners, including less, with respect to countability and collcctivity. Finally, note four examines the status of less as a comparative, and attempts to resolve thereby two anomalies observed in note 1. I do not address here, for the most part, the "adverbial" uses of less and its ancestors. (1)
1. Five items or less
In its article on less the OED deseribes the usage illustrated by (1):
1) I thinke there are few Vniversities that haue lesse faultes than Oxford, many that haue more. (Lyly 1579 [1923]: 208)
as "now regarded as incorrect". And this seems to be a view shared by many who concern themselves with such things. The general feeling (as embodied in e.g., Fowler 1926: 321; Gowers 1973: 227-228) seems to be that when a plural noun is aceompanied by a paueal quantifier that quantifier should be few, as with the first quantifier plus plural noun combination in (1).
However, we continue as users of English to encounter and perhaps produce instances of less plus plural noun, and not just in such manifestations as the supermarket sign that gives this note its title, where the censorious might be apt to find simply signs of ill-education (and the less censorious might get excited about social variation rather than, or as well as, syntax and semanties). Juul (1972: 1, n. 3, 1975: 215, n. 3), for instance, notes the examples in (2) from his corpus of (then) largely recent texts: (2)
2) a. But there were less casualties than might have been expected ... (Orwell 1938: 84)
b. The metropolitan area itself has a million less residents and half a million fewer jobs than in 1939. (NS: 413)
c. We have less grounds for optimism about the immediate financial outlook. (ST: 63)
d. Sir,--Mr Bilan Allison ... makes a plea for more coherence and less frills in art education. (TES: 2)
e. When we land at New York, this door will lead you to Pan Am's shiny new 93 million dollar terminal. It's the slickest, fastest terminal at Kennedy--less steps to the street than from any other terminal. (Foylibra: 7)
What is striking is that these quantified phrases all share a semantic property: the quantified phrase is to be interpreted collectively.
We can illustrate collective vs. distributive/singulative in relation to a sub-type of those nouns which are often referred to as "collective" nouns--rather unhelpfully so called given that they can be used either collectively or distributively, as in (3a) (collective) vs. (3b) (distributive):
3) a. The committee is/are convening right now.
b. The committee are gnashing their teeth.
"(Intransitive) convening" is a necessarily collective aetivity; "gnashing teeth" is distributed throughout the individual members of the group. The collective use of sueh nouns, what I shall refer to as group nouns, permits but does not necessitate a singular verb concord.
It might be argued that in the uses in (2) the nouns are perhaps even lexicalised as plural and collective expressions of a collection seen as a unity. But even this might give us pause, at least, in simply seeing the use of less with plurals as "incorrect". However, let us confront the argument that the occurrence of less here is indeed simply a reflection of lexicalisation of these plural forms, as Fowler (1926: 321) suggests concerning troops and clothes. In this case, we would have to recognise that these lexically plural nouns also have, in the case of those in (2d, e), at least, regular count congeners, as in a frill, a step; and with all of them fewer is available as a non-synonymous alternative to less. Moreover, colloquially, at least, and given the appropriate circumstances, almost any count noun can be given an appropriate collective interpretation if quantified with less. Consider, for example, the range of possibilities in (4):
4) What we want in government is less women/lawyers/ABs/lords/ do-gooders ...
Again, the use of less here insists on a collective interpretation; (4) is concerned with the size of a grouping. In this case the context almost forces such an interpretation on the otherwise normally distributive fewer, but less is more insistently anti-distributive.
There is one circumstance in which the collectivity of less, compared with fewer, is particularly evident; and it is also one where the association of less with a plural interpretation is especially difficult to dismiss as "incorrect", given its prevalence. Consider (5), where a numeral is the source of the comparison:
5) a. She earned less/?fewer than twenty pounds.
b. She weighed less/*fewer than 100 pounds.
Poutsma (1914: 302-304, [section]16, 1916: 1104, [section]76) cites, but scarcely comments on,...
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