Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus, Vol. 48, 2015, 93-111
doi: 10.5842/48-0-690
The uses of some as determiner in BSAfE
Yolande Botha
North-West University, South Africa
E-mail: Lande.Botha@nwu.ac.za
Abstract
The determiner some is used primarily as an indication of an unspecified, but particular
quantity. The question of whether this core meaning of some is extended in Black South
African English (BSAfE) is addressed in this paper. In an intercorpus comparison, it is found
(unexpectedly) that the determiner some occurs significantly less frequently in the BSAfE
corpus than in the Indian English corpus. However, it is also found that the determiner some
precedes plural nouns significantly more frequently in BSAfE than in Indian English. Similar
differences are not observed in a comparison of BSAfE with a Kenyan English corpus. In the
BSAfE intracorpus investigation, a collexeme analysis indicates a strong collocational
attraction between the determiner some and a number of plural nouns. A co-varying
collexeme analysis among all possible determiners and five frequently occurring non-singular
nouns provides further confirmation of the strong association between some and plural nouns.
Keywords: Black South African English, determiner, quantifier
1.
Introduction
Observations of the notable uses of determinative some in Black South African English
(BSAfE) focus on the use of some with the quantifier few. Van der Walt and Van Rooy (2002:
124) report a 72% acceptance rate of the expression some few among BSAfE learners. De
Klerk (2003a: 232) reports 10 instances of some few in her corpus of over 540 000 words of
spoken Xhosa English, although she notes 43 instances overall “in which some was used
inappropriately” (De Klerk 2003b: 470), which include instances where some is used with
non-pluralised forms of countable nouns. These “inappropriate” uses of some are grouped
with expressions like too much (meaning „very much‟) under the heading “overgeneralisation
of quantifiers” (De Klerk 2003b: 470). Minow (2010: 63) reports only two instances of some
few in her database of 85 431 words of spoken BSAfE. She provides the following example:
(1)
I think like some few weeks ago, (.) they had a official opening of one of the bars,
(...) so. (BSAEF06) (Minow 2010: 63).
The use of some few instead of a few is regarded as a feature of New Englishes in general.
Platt, Weber and Ho (1984: 60) attribute this to the strong association that few has with
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plurality, remarking that “[t]he use of a seems incompatible with few and couple which are
associated with the plural”.
(2)
(3)
You are expected to say some few words (from Sri Lankan English) (Platt et al.
1984: 60)
Some few minutes past nine I leave the office (from West African English) (Platt et
al. 1984: 60)
A concordance comparison of some in BSAfE student writing (Tswana Learner English
Corpus) and native English student writing (Louvain Corpus of Native English Essay)1
suggests that the non-proportional meaning of some as determiner is extended to contexts in
which it would not be used in Standard English (Botha 2012, 2013). In many of these cases
the agnate standard expression would have no determiner, as illustrated in the example below.
(4)
the goverment would be losing some sums of money to not so committed soccer
players. <ICLE-TS-NOUN-0386.1> (Botha 2012)
It is argued that some is used like the non-singular counterpart of a/an instead of the zero
determiner with plural nouns to explicitly mark the noun phrase as indefinite in BSAfE
student writing (Botha 2013). This use of some as a kind of plural indefinite “article” is
interpreted as further evidence of the anti-deleting trend that Mesthrie (2006) identifies as
characteristic of BSAfE grammar in general. The “article” function of some is especially
noticeable in collocations with postdeterminers and quantifiers. As can be seen in the
following examples from the Tswana Learner English Corpus:
(5)
(6)
In some certain circumstances, men ill-treat women. <ICLE-TS-NOUN-0501.1>
They go to some severals areas including towns where they becomes the prostitudes
<ICLE-TS-NOUN-0172.1>
From a prescriptive perspective the use of some in the examples above will be regarded as
non-standard since some is generally treated as an existential quantifier (e.g. Payne and
Huddleston 2002: 358). However, in examples (5) and (6) the quantificational meaning of
some is secondary to its indefinite meaning in much the same way as the quantificational
meaning of a/an has become secondary to its indefinite meaning in the process of the
grammaticalisation of the word one (Botha 2012, 2013). In Standard English reformulations
of the noun phrases underlined in examples (5) and (6) above, the zero article would be
preferred (viz. certain circumstances and several areas, respectively). Singulative
reformulations would be a certain circumstance and one area, respectively.
It is proposed here that many of the so-called “non-standard” uses of some in BSAfE can be
explained in terms of the application of a noun phrase template with an overt (in)definiteness
marker (i.e. article). The article-like use of some can be seen as a “nativized semanticostructural analogy” (Mukherjee 2010, Mukherjee and Hoffman 2006). In these cases the use
of some with plural nouns is analogous to the obligatory use of a/an with (countable)
indefinite singular nouns.
1
Both these corpora are part of the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger, Dagneaux, Meunier and
Paquot 2009).
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The uses of some as determiner in BSAfE
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The possibility that the determiner some is used to fulfil a more article-like function in BSAfE
will be investigated with reference to larger corpus data sets. Given the observations of some
few and some couple of in other New Englishes (Platt et al. 1984: 60), a quantitative
comparison of the use of some in three corpora representing New Englishes was conducted.
To establish whether the proposed article-like use of some with plural nouns observed in
BSAfE student writing by Botha (2013) can also be attested in other text types, the choice of
some as determiner was examined in a BSAfE corpus that allows for comparison of student
writing with professional writing (both academic and journalistic) and conversation. It is
possible that features in student writing as part of the learning process are not retained in more
advanced written registers. Therefore, grammatical features attested in professional and
academic writing are a more accurate indication of stabilisation in the variety.
The quantitative investigation aims to highlight the larger context of the uses of some whereas
the qualitative examination of concordance examples aims to establish whether the function
of some as a plural counterpart of the indefinite article a/an adequately explains the uses of
some in BSAfE that have hitherto simply been regarded as deviations from the native English
norm. However, it is not suggested that the pattern some Nplural is preferred over Ø Nplural. It
goes without saying that the article-like use with plural nouns is not the only way in which
some is used in BSAfE and concordance analyses show that it is mostly used in the same
ways as in native English.
2.
The meanings of determiner some
Syntactically, the word some can function as a pronoun or a determiner. It is useful to
distinguish two pronominal some-constructions – one where some is the logical head in a
partitive of-construction, and one where some constitutes a one-word noun phrase functioning
as clausal element. Semantically, the word some (regardless of its syntactic position) is
usually regarded as a quantifier. Payne and Huddleston (2002: 358ff) follow the tradition of
formal logic in treating some as an existential quantifier along with any, stating that some is
the “most straightforward expression” of existential quantification and defining it as an
indication of a quantity or number greater than zero. Payne and Huddleston (2002: 360) point
out that with countable nouns, some “indicates not just a number greater than zero but a
number no less than two” (my emphasis – YB).
Payne and Huddleston (2002: 364-365) further distinguish between the proportional and the
non-proportional uses of some. When some implies „not all‟ it has a proportional meaning,
and if some does not activate a „not all‟ implicature, it is interpreted non-proportionally.
(7)
(8)
Some people misunderstood the question. [proportional] (Payne and Huddleston
2002: 364)
I saw some children climb over the fence. [non-proportional] (Payne and Huddleston
2002: 364)
In (7), the speaker has a larger set in mind, but the I in (8) does not have a larger set of
children in mind – of which a proportion could be seen climbing over the fence. As the
examples above illustrate, the non-proportional uses of some are only relevant to the
determinative function of some. The pronominal uses of some have inherent proportional
meaning in that they always activate the „not all‟ implicature.
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While the distinction between the proportional and non-proportional senses of some is useful
in describing its quantificational uses, Duffley and Larrivée (2012) argue that the determiner
some can also have non-quantitative, i.e. qualitative, meanings that have not been adequately
accounted for. The authors provide an extensive overview and critique of the treatment of
some (i) in the logical tradition and (ii) in a model of scalar implicature. As logical quantifier
some signifies a quantity of „at least one, possibly more‟ and implies that the entity, or set of
entities, is unidentified, while some as scalar attenuator is supposed to evoke a “less-thanexpected quantity on a pragmatic scale” (Duffley and Larrivée 2012: 132). Duffley and
Larrivée (2012: 132) use the following examples to illustrate a qualitative sense of some that
is not explained by the logical nor the scalar view of some:
(9) That was some frittata.
(10) He made some thirty-three snowmen that afternoon.
The frittata in question is identifiable (hence the use of the demonstrative that) and larger or
better than expected. Thirty-three is an exact number, not an unidentified estimate, and
although the logical criterion of „at least one, possibly more‟ is met, it does not contribute to
the definition of some. Again, a number greater, not less, than expected is at issue. In the
latter example, the meaning of some is also qualitative. Duffley and Larrivée (2012) go on
to propose an exposition of the meaning of some that can account for both its quantitative
and qualitative senses. They argue that “a single underlying meaning, modulated by
contextual and pragmatic factors, can give rise to the wide variety of messages expressed by
some in actual usage” (Duffley and Larrivée 2012: 132-133). This single, underlying
meaning of some evokes “a particular, but non-identified referent” (Duffley and Larrivée
2012: 143, my emphasis – YB). This non-identification of a particular referent can give rise
to “qualitative denigration (implying it is not even worth the bother to identify the referent)
or qualitative appreciation (implying the referent to be so outstanding it defies
identification)” (Duffley and Larrivée 2012: 131). Qualitative denigration arising from nonidentification is illustrated in examples (11) and (12) below, while the example of some
frittata in (9) above is illustrative of the use of some to express appreciation of
exceptionality (cf. also Duffley and Larrivée 2012: 141-142).
(11) Some idiots must have tracked mud into the lobby (Duffley and Larrivée 2012: 137).
(12) He was looking for some brand of coffee from the Malabar coast (Duffley and
Larrivée 2012: 137).
Duffley and Larrivée (2012: 139) point out that in combination with numerals, some can either
convey „approximation‟, which Payne and Huddleston (2002: 380) refer to as “considerable
quantity”. The example in (10) of some thirty-three snowmen illustrates the use of some to express
qualitative appreciation of an identified, but exceptional, quantity. Approximative interpretations
of some with numerals are associated more with round numbers, as shown in (13).
(13) There were some fifty villages that agreed to the plan (Duffley and Larrivée 2012: 139).
In (13), some characterises fifty as an approximate quantity. Stressed some can express both a
small quantity and a rather large quantity (Duffley and Larrivée 2012: 139, Payne and
Huddleston 2002: 140), as can be seen in (14) and (15):
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The uses of some as determiner in BSAfE
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(14) I have some idea of what you mean, but it‟s still a bit hazy.
(15) It was some years before she saw him again.
In addition to stress (sentence accent), the grammatical number features of the noun
determined by some can serve as a modulating factor in the interpretation of some (Duffley
and Larrivée 2012: 142-143). For instance, the pejorative qualitative sense of some is
typically associated with the singular form. Duffley and Larrivée (2012: 143) explain how the
underlying meaning of some, namely “a particular, but non-identified referent” applies
differently to singular and plural nouns. With singular nouns, some indicates that the referent
itself is not identified. With plural and mass nouns, some indicates an unidentified quantity.
Corpus instances of the determiner some with plural nouns in noun phrases that can be
interpreted as non-proportional and/or as non-particular would indicate a potential extension
of the core meaning of some to an article-like function.
3.
Corpora
For the first part of the study, a corpus of BSAfE was compared with two corpora
representing New Englishes. Like in Van Rooy (2014)2, this study makes use of selected
sections of the Indian and East-African (Kenyan) components of the International Corpus of
English (ICE-IND and ICE-EA(K)) for which comparable BSAfE corpus data exist. Like
BSAfE, Indian English and Kenyan English can be regarded as Outer Circle varieties in terms
of Kachru‟s (1986) classification of the varieties of English. These Outer Circle varieties
share some common characteristics, as already indicated by Platt et al. (1984). Van Rooy
(2010: 14) contrasts a tendency among Outer Circle varieties to avoid morphologically
marking of redundant features with the anti-deletion tendency of Black South African English
mentioned by Mesthrie (2006). Where Outer Circle varieties generally tend to avoid marking
of redundant features, one finds in BSAfE overt marking of syntactic relations not usually
marked in other varieties of English. The article-like use of some in contexts where it would
normally be omitted is regarded as further evidence of the anti-deletion tendency (Botha
2013). The expectation is that this use of some will not occur in other Outer Circle varieties,
such as Kenyan English and Indian English.
Like BSAfE, Kenyan English and Indian English also represent institutionalised varieties of
second-language English used by speakers possibly coming from different first language
backgrounds in multilingual countries. The BSAfE corpus data represent various (but related)
first-language (L1) backgrounds. The variety in L1 backgrounds (at least nine of the official
languages), and differing levels of proficiency, have given rise to questions about the validity
of the term “Black South African English” (De Klerk 2003b: 464). The nine L1s of speakers
of BSAfE can be divided into four clusters, the largest of which are the Nguni (isiZulu,
isiXhosa, isiNdebele, SiSwati) and Sotho-Tswana (Sesotho, Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana)
groups (Zerbian 2015). All of these languages are Southern Bantu languages and, as such,
have much in common structurally. Makalela (2004) illustrates the role of Bantu language
structure in features of BSAfE relating to the extension of progressive aspect, tense
sequencing, topic promotion devices and modality markers, using examples from Sepedi (a
Northern Sotho dialect). De Klerk (2003a,b) finds evidence for some of these features in her
corpus of Spoken Xhosa English, specifically with regard to topic pronouns and the extension
2
I wish to thank Bertus van Rooy for generously sharing the BSAfE corpus data and sample sets used in his
research.
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98
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of the progressive. These examples of similar grammatical features in BSAfE from speakers
with differing L1 varieties suggest that it is not unreasonable to use BSAfE corpus data
collected from speakers of differing L1 backgrounds when grammatical structures are studied.
Van Rooy (2008, 2014), for instance, uses such data in studying aspect in BSAfE. In a study
of focus marking in BSAfE, Zerbian (2015: 228) finds that differences in frequency of
syntactic structures “cannot be accounted for solely by L1 influence”, while prosodic
differences “can be related to L1 influence”. It should also be borne in mind that many
speakers of BSAfE, are not only bilingual, but multilingual, fluently speaking more than one
of the indigenous South African languages (Coetzee-Van Rooy 2012).
Table 1 gives a breakdown of the corpora with an indication of the relevant ICE
subcomponents.
Table 1: Compilation of corpora
(Broadcast) interviews and discussions (S1B-021–050)
Conversation (S1A-001–090)
Class lessons (S1B-001–020)
Academic writing (W2A-001–040)
Student writing (W1A-001–020)
Journalism (W2C-001–020)
Fiction (W2F001–020)
TOTAL (raw frequency of tokens)
ICE-IND
74 715
193 675
43 797
84 594
40 711
39 411
47 572
524 475
ICEEA(K)
86 732
55 419
27 685
79 134
39 766
39 538
40 086
368 360
BSAfE
47 610
113 444
57 709
48 315
200 601
42 575
72 904
583 158
The data from ICE-IND corresponds with the ICE text codes given in Table 1, while ICEEA(K) deviates slightly from the standard composition of ICE corpora (Schmied 1990). The
ICE-EA(K) class lessons range from S1B-001K to S1B-013K, while student writing goes up to
W1A-021. ICE-EA(K) has less conversation samples than typical ICE corpora (S1A-001K to
S1A-0017K and S1A-021K to S1A-030K). The Volkswagen corpus (in Meierkord 2012)
constitutes the interview component of the BSAfE data. BSAfE student writing is represented
by the Tswana Learner English Corpus, which was originally collected as part of the
International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) (Granger et al. 2009). The BSAfE conversation
and class-lesson components consist of samples from De Klerk‟s (2003a) corpus of spoken
Xhosa English. The journalism and fiction components of the BSAfE corpus consist of texts
published in the 1990s-2000s collected by Van Rooy (2014). The raw word frequencies for the
various corpora were obtained with the Wordlist function in Wordsmith 6.0 (Scott 2013), which
allows for the exclusion of extralinguistic information (in the form of mark-up).
For the second part of the study, a smaller sampling of the abovementioned BSAfE corpus
along with additional student essays were used and grouped to represent three text types,
namely conversation, student writing and professional writing. The conversation component
consists of a sample (n = 53) of conversations from De Klerk‟s (2003a) corpus of spoken
Xhosa English and 12 interviews from the Volkswagen Corpus (Meierkord 2012), the student
writing component consists of a smaller sample of the Tswana Learner English Corpus (81 of
the 519 essays), and 60 student essays from Gauteng and 81 texts collected by Beth Jefferey
in the Eastern Cape. The professional writing component consists of the 20 journalism texts
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The uses of some as determiner in BSAfE
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used in the aforementioned BSAfE corpus, and 25 excerpts from academic theses (each
approximately 1000 words in length). The breakdown of this corpus is given in Table 2.
Table 2: Compilation of BSAfE subcorpora
BSAfE subcorpus
Conversation
Student writing
Professional writing
4.
Number of texts
65
222
45
Number of tokens
178 825
87 405
68 380
Distribution of some across three New Englishes corpora
Concordances of some were drawn for every subcorpus. The determinative uses of some were
then isolated from its pronominal uses. Table 3 provides the raw number of occurrences of
some as determiner together with the normalised frequency of determinative some per 10 000
words in the relevant corpus component.
Table 3: Frequencies of determinative some in three WE corpora
Raw frequencies
Broadcast interviews and discussions
Conversation
Classroom lessons
Academic writing
Student writing
Journalism
Fiction
TOTAL
ICEICEIND EA(K)
149
172
507
95
50
31
82
113
74
93
37
40
44
55
943
599
BSAf
E
69
162
42
50
514
25
96
958
Relative frequencies per
10 000 words
ICEICE- BSAf
IND EA(K)
E
19.9
19.8
14.5
26.2
17.1
14.3
1.4
11.2
7.3
9.7
14.3
10.3
18.2
23.4
25.6
9.4
10.1
5.9
9.2
13.7
13.2
18.0
16.3
16.4
The relative frequencies in Table 3 show that there is some variability across the corpora
within registers. Most notable is the lower frequency of determinative some in the spoken
BSAfE registers. Contingency tables (Chi-square, Fisher Exact, Log likelihood tests) were
used to compare the total raw frequencies of determinative some in relation to the total
number of all other tokens in two corpora at a time. The difference in the observed
frequencies of determinative some in the BSAfE and ICE-EA(K) corpora is not statistically
significant (p > 0.8), whereas both the BSAfE corpus and the Kenyan English corpus differ
significantly from the Indian English corpus in this respect (p ≤ 0.05). The significantly lower
frequency of determinative some in the BSAfE corpus compared to the Indian English corpus
seems to disprove the hypothesis that some is used as an (undeleted) indefinite marker in
BSAfE, whereas a higher frequency of determinative some in BSAfE would have supported
the notion of the extended usage of some to article-like functions in this variety.
The next step was to categorise all instances of determinative some according to the number
features of the head noun of the noun phrase in which some is the determiner. Care was taken
to discount repetitions due to dysfluencies in the spoken data as more than one noun phrase.
In a small number of cases it was not possible to classify the noun as count singular, count
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plural or non-count, either because the transcriber could not make out the word or the word
was in another language – the number marking of which could not be confirmed. There were
4 such instances in the BSAfE corpus, 3 in ICE-EA(K) and 14 in ICE-IND. There was also
one case in ICE-EA(K) and two in ICE-IND where the head determined by some was not a
common noun, but a cardinal numeral. These cases are not counted as part of the results
reported in Table 4, which provides the percentages of determinative some with the
aforementioned three types of noun.
Table 4: Distribution of determinative some with different types of nouns (percentage of total
occurrences of determinative some) in three WE corpora
ICE-IND
ICE-EA(K)
BSAfE
%
%
%
%
%
%
% with with
% with with
% with with
with non- singu with non- singu with non- singu
plural count
-lar plural count
-lar plural count
-lar
noun noun noun noun noun noun noun noun noun
Interviews and
discussions
Conversation
Classroom lessons
Spoken subtotal
Student writing
Academic writing
Journalism
Fiction
Written subtotal
TOTAL
49.7
43.8
46.0
45.2
60.8
63.4
75.7
27.3
57.8
51.5
24.5
23.9
30.0
24.5
23.0
31.7
16.2
47.7
29.5
27.0
25.9
32.3
24.0
30.3
16.2
4.9
8.1
25.0
12.7
21.5
57.0
35.9
77.4
52.5
58.7
74.3
72.5
41.8
63.3
57.9
15.7
34.8
6.5
20.7
25.0
15.0
17.5
52.7
25.3
23.0
27.3
29.3
16.1
26.8
16.3
10.6
10.0
5.5
11.3
19.1
56.5
68.1
75.0
66.2
79.0
72.0
68.0
33.3
71.7
68.9
21.7
13.1
15.0
15.6
13.2
16.0
24.0
22.9
15.2
15.4
21.7
18.8
10.0
18.2
7.8
12.0
8.0
43.8
13.1
15.7
There is great variability across the registers within the same corpus and within the same
register across corpora. For instance, in the BSAfE corpus, 43.8% of the occurrences of
determinative some in the fiction component occur with singular countable nouns, whereas
only 8% of determinative some in the journalism component and student writing component
are headed by singular nouns. In the BSAfE student writing component, 79% of the instances
of determinative some occur with plural nouns. In the student writing components of ICEIND and ICE-EA(K) there are nearly 20% fewer uses of determinative some with plural
nouns (60.8% and 58.7%, respectively). This might be due to the high frequency of the noun
people in the BSAfE student writing data. In the next section collocation between nouns and
determiners will be considered in more detail. The use of some with non-singular (plural +
noncount) nouns is significantly higher in the BSAfE student writing data compared to the
student writing component of ICE-IND (p = 0.048 with Fisher‟s Exact Test).3
It should be pointed out that the hypothesis that some is used as (undeleted) plural marker of
indefiniteness arose from a comparison between only the BSAfE student writing subcorpus
(in Tables 2 and 3 above) and native English data (Botha 2013). The high frequency of plural
nouns after some in the BSAfE written corpus (71.7%) is also mainly due to the student
3
Online calculators: http://statpages.org/ctab2x2.html and http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/llwizard.html.
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The uses of some as determiner in BSAfE
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writing component. However, the relative frequency of the determiner some is higher in this
component of the BSAfE corpus (25.6 per 10 000, cf. Table 2) compared to the other two
corpora (18.2 and 23.4 per 10 000, respectively). The percentages for some before plural
nouns in the other BSAfE written registers (journalism, academic and fiction) are actually
lower than in the corresponding register in at least one of the other two corpora (cf. Table 3).
In the spoken registers, the higher frequency of some before plural nouns in the BSAfE corpus
is more obvious. Overall, some more frequently determines plural nouns in BSAfE (68.9%)
than in ICE-EA(K) (57.9%) and both African English corpora have proportionally more
instances of some as determiner of plural nouns than ICE-IND (51.5%).
The quantitative comparison of some as determiner in Indian English, Kenyan English and
BSAfE corpora shows a relatively lower frequency of this determiner per 10 000 words in the
African English corpora compared to Indian English, and that some precedes plural nouns
more often in the African English corpora than in the Indian English corpus.
5.
The choice of determiner some in BSAfE registers4
In the previous section it was shown that the determiner some occurs with plural nouns more
frequently in the BSAfE corpus. In this section the nouns with which some collocates, and the
choice of some from other possible determiners will be investigated in three registers of
BSAfE, namely conversation, student writing and professional writing.
Concordances of the word some were drawn from each of the three BSAfE registers. Since
the benchmark tagger (CLAWS) tags all instances of some and any with “DD” without
distinguishing pronominal uses from determinative (prenominal) uses, concordances of the
untagged version of the corpus were manually classified to separate the instances where some
is used as determiner from the instances where it is used as a pronoun. Table 5 provides an
overview of the raw frequencies of the word some according to its three word class functions.
Table 5: The word some in BSAfE: Raw frequencies
BSAfE subcorpus
Conversation
Student writing
Professional
writing
TOTAL
Number of
instances of
some as
determiner
242
192
50
484
Number of
Number of instances of
instances of some as both
some in
Other
logical and
partitive of- experiential
(not preconstruction
head of NP /pronominal)
89
44
55
91
31
16
28
208
5
80
1
72
Total
instances of
the word
some
430
330
84
844
To establish which nouns follow the determiner some most frequently, a collexeme analysis
was conducted (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003, Gries 2014). The concordance lines of some as
determiner had to be sifted to identify the noun determined by some in each instance. It was
The term “register” is used here in the same sense as it is used by Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad and Finegan
(1999), i.e. to refer to text types, or “super genres”, for instance conversation.
4
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not a matter of simply looking up the word immediately to the right of some, since these could
be postdeterminers, numerals, adjectives or classifying nouns, which were ultimately ignored.
The table of collocates in the concordance tool of Wordsmith 6.0 is purely positional and
counts the amount of times a word occurs in a certain position without regarding the
boundaries of grammatical units such as noun phrases. This collocation table (in spreadsheet
format) provided a starting point, but had to be carefully checked against the concordance
lines. The focus was on only the head element of noun phrases in which some fills the
determiner slot. The R-script Coll.analysis 3.5 (Gries 2014) was used to calculate
collocational strength based on Fisher-Yates contingency tests between the determiner some
and its head nouns (cf. also Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003: 218). To calculate the
collocational strength, an input table listing the nouns determined by some, the total number
of occurrences of each of these nouns in the register subcorpus, and the number of times each
noun occurred as head of a noun phrase in which some is the determiner, had to be prepared.
In addition to the input tables for each of the three BSAfE registers, the total number of
occurrences of determinative some (cf. the second column of Table 5 above) and an estimate
of the total number of noun phrases that could take a determiner had to be provided. This
estimate was arrived at by counting all possible common noun tags in a version of the corpus,
which was part-of-speech-tagged with CLAWS. The estimated number of potential noun
phrases headed by common nouns (and therefore able to take a determiner) for each register is
as follows: conversation (21 908), student writing (18 396), professional writing (17 631).
Tables 6, 7 and 8 in the Appendix provide the collostructional strengths between some and
nouns for which p < 0.01, i.e. where the collostructional strength is higher than 2. The noun
with which some collocates most strongly is people5 in both the conversation data (see
Table 6) and the student writing data (see Table 7). Of the 13 nouns in the conversation data
with a collostructional strength higher than 2 (Table 6), 11 are plural nouns: children, places,
skills, classes, words, courses, weeks, orders, meetings, families.
In both the writing registers there are uncountable nouns that strongly collocate with the
determiner some, most notably the abstract noun extent in the student writing (see Table 7)
and degree in the professional writing (see Table 8). In these cases some evokes paucity, and
a non-proportional interpretation (in keeping with standard usage), as illustrated in (16) and
(17) below.
(16) To some extent poverty is the cause of HIV/AIDS epidemic in the continent.
<WXE005> [Student writing]
(17) Property experts say the amendments will protect owners and tenants, and to some
degree it will limit the rights of people who illegally occupy land and property.
<W2C-005> [Professional writing]
Of the 11 nouns that strongly collocate with some in the student writing data (Table 7), 7 are
plural (instances, colleagues, cases, newspapers, countries, ladies – in addition to people), 2
are uncountable (extent, money), and 2 are singular (distance, animal). Of the 12 nouns with
5
Strictly speaking, the noun people is not inflected for number and can take a plural -s as in the peoples of the
African continent. However, people is semantically plural in that it denotes a set of countable entities. It also
behaves as a plural noun syntactically in terms of subject-verb agreement. Table 6 also contains the genitive
form of the plural noun children. It should be noted that in these cases some children’s is a complex possessive
determiner in a larger NP, and some is the determiner of the noun children.
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The uses of some as determiner in BSAfE
103
which some has a collocational strength higher than 2 in the professional writing data
(Table 8), half are plural (cases, financials, staffers, authors, situations, suppliers), 2 are used
in an uncountable sense (degree, recourse) and 4 are singular (kind, impetus, way, aspect).
In all three registers, most of the nouns that strongly collocate with some are plural. As was
indicated earlier, some is used with particular referents. With plural nouns some typically
triggers a proportional interpretation of „not all‟, although it can also indicate an unspecified
quantity. The question is whether some with plural nouns in the BSAfE corpus is used in these
senses, and whether it is used only in these senses. This question will be considered in the light
of examples of the some people pattern, since people is the noun that most strongly collocates
with the determiner some in both the conversation and student writing data. In examples (18)
and (19) below, the underlined noun phrases have particular referents. In example (18), some is
used proportionally. In example (19) some denotes an unspecified quantity.
(18) the fact is some people adapt their style and there is this thing that some they don‟t
some do <#dpc081> [Conversation]
(19) when you go partying and you‟re at a deep House or like some hectic Hip Hop party,
you will bump into some white people in fact a whole lot of them and they‟ll be into
it as much as you are or whatever <Meierkord/Volkswagen: Students2>
[Conversation]
Most of the instances of some with plural nouns in the BSAfE data realise the typical
(standard) meanings illustrated above. However, there are also instances where some is used
in contexts where no determiner would be selected in Standard English. In (20)-(23) below, it
is possible to omit the determiner in the underlined noun phrases. The noun people has a nonspecific interpretation in examples (20) and (21) (where it is used in clauses with an irrealis
scope) and a generic interpretation in examples (22) and (23), rather than a particular referent.
(20) we need some people some big people as you mention mister xonxa the people who
is going to motivate <#dpc064> [Conversation]
(21) So I think the main solution to reduce the victims of HIV/AIDS is that the
government should create more jobs; give free education to some people in rural
areas who can‟t afford and distibute foods and clothes to those who can‟t afford
<TSNO1134> [Student writing]
(22) okay like your friends maybe they are rich and then you are poor and then when
when you are going out on on street some people are looking at you and say eyi those
boys they are having cool life but this one eyi he is not having cool life <#dpc159>
[Conversation]
(23) I can understand that ja to to you it works because there‟s a saying that to some
people who don‟t believe in traditional rituals rituals ja ja that that‟s a waste of
money <#dpc118> [Conversation]
In (20) and (21), ideal (hypothetical) circumstances are described. The speaker/writer is not
referring to particular persons, but an unspecified quantity of a certain type of person. This
usage context would call for the selection of no overt determiner with the noun people. One
might speculate that the “referents” of the noun become cognitively “particular” as the
hypothesised circumstances become cognitively “real” in the mind of the speaker/writer. In a
qualitative analysis of texts from the Tswana Learner English Corpus, Van Rooy (2008: 351)
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also describes noun phrases in hypothetical situations or events that are developed into “specific
entities” by means of determiners and modifiers. The use of some in (22) and (23) seems to be
motivated by a need to make the „not all‟ implicature of the noun explicit. The determiner some
is also used in the generic sense with nouns other than people, as illustrated in (24) below:
(24) so in that question of experience how how do you feel about that because some other
bosses might ask you for experience you see how do you feel about the experience
issue? <#dpc141> [Conversation]
Here, some is used with the postdeterminer other, although there is no prior mention of a
referent with which the referent of this noun phrase can be contrasted. In a standard English
reformulation both words can be omitted. In the conversation data there are 12 instances
where some other is used before a noun. There are three such instances of some other N in the
professional writing data and eight in the student writing data. In (25) some could have been
omitted, and in (26) other could have been omitted.
(25) they are doing so forced by the requirement to discharge their obligation, which
means that there are some other competitive suppliers of the same products
elsewhere in the world who are over looked to the benefit of the local<m_t1000>
[Professional writing]
(26) Now for that matter for instance if some is sick the or she must eat good, adequate
food according to sickness because some other diseases are caused by enedequate
food <XUE066> [Student writing]
The concordance of some in the conversation component yields several examples with other
quantifiers and numerals.
(27) clinically adam lived some nine hundred years after eating from the tree <#dpc165>
(28) you are good looking but why don‟t you just go and eh try to have some many
friends out there but you i always seeing you going to church <#dpc191>
(29) like today he just say tomorrow there‟s gonna be a discrepancy and now some some
certain few members should go there see what i mean #dpc240
(30) Eh she is now (..) two years [(.)] and some couple of months. <Volkswagen>
(31) I think like some few weeks ago <Volkswagen>
(32) sometimes you know take some few kids from the location and get some extra
classes there <#dpc051>
The example in (27) corresponds with the standard use of some with rounded numerals to
express an uncertain but considerable quantity. It is not certain whether the single instance of
some many, as shown in (28) in the corpus, is an extension of this use or whether it is selfcorrection. In examples (29) to (32) some is used as “plural” of the singulative indefinite
article a. Although the some few combination is marked in contemporary English, it is not
unusual from a diachronic perspective, as the example from a corpus of written White South
African English (Wasserman and Van Rooy 2014) illustrates:
(33) When some few days more had elapsed, one morning, shrill screams of pain and
terror …<1850s narratives>
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The uses of some as determiner in BSAfE
105
In summary, scrutiny of the concordances of some indicates that its determinative uses in
BSAfE largely correspond with Standard English, but that there is evidence of an extension of
the usage of some in BSAfE to non-particular contexts. Also, it would seem that the more
grammaticalised use of some as plural counterpart of a with the quantifier few seems to
continue in BSAfE, whereas it has been discontinued in Standard English varieties. The
article-like use of some with other, as plural counterpart of another also suggests that this
determiner is more grammaticalised in BSAfE than in Standard English.
Whereas the indefinite article a/an is obligatory before singular countable nouns, some before
non-singular nouns is not. To examine the choice of some among other determiners with nonsingular nouns, concordances of five nouns that occurred very frequently in at least two of the
BSAfE registers were drawn. This time, the concordances were drawn from the full corpus
and no distinction was made between the registers. The nouns of which concordances were
drawn are: people, things, women, money and poverty. These nouns were chosen because they
are semantically non-singular denoting either sets of countable entities or uncountable
concepts, and because they occur frequently enough to allow for potential collocation with a
variety of determiners.6
The concordance lines of each noun phrase were classified according to the determiner. Some
determiners where grouped together as a single type of determiner, e.g. the and such. The
word other is conventionally regarded as a special kind of “relative” adjective or as a
postdeterminer. In spite of not being a central determiner, the word other is at the same rank
as some in contrastive contexts (e.g. some students ... other students), and where it occurred
without a definite determiner preceding it, it was classified as a determiner in its own right.
Due to the quantificational meanings of some, an argument can also be made that it exists in a
choice relationship with numerals and other indefinite quantifiers. Therefore, these were also
classified as a type of “determiner” in the concordance data. Table 9 (in the Appendix)
provides the raw frequencies of each determiner class used with the selected nouns. Each of
these nouns most frequently occurs with the zero determiner. The definite article is the second
most frequent determiner with people, money, women and poverty. With the noun things,
demonstrative determiners are chosen in a quarter of the instances.
Gries‟s (2014) Coll.analysis 3.5 R-script was used again to determine the strength of
association between a given determiner or determiner type and the five selected nouns. This
time a co-varying collexeme analysis was performed and the input table consisted of each
concordance line (from all five noun concordances) reduced to only the word in the
determiner slot (w1) and the head noun (w2). The construction (c) under investigation is a
noun phrase with one of the five chosen non-singular nouns as logico-semantic head.
Qualificative modifiers were ignored. Table 10 presents the results restricted only to
associations with a strength above 2 (i.e. p < 0.01). Relations between a determiner and a
noun are expressed as attraction (+) or repulsion (-).
The high level of attraction between some and people is confirmed in the co-varying collexeme
analysis (collocational strength = 6.66). The determiner some does not have a significantly strong
association with any of the other four nouns under investigation. The noun people is also
6
Only a few nouns were selected to check whether some is preferred over the zero determiner with nouns with nonsingular meaning. Ideally, all nouns and all determiners in a corpus could be used to provide a full collexeme
analysis; however, this would be a time-consuming task that falls outside the scope of the current study.
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positively associated with other (collocational strength = 4.99). Demonstrative and quantifying
determiners are also strongly attracted to the noun people. There is a strong negative association
(i.e. repulsion) between the zero determiner and people, given the frequency of this noun and the
frequency of the zero determiner with the other nouns under investigation, despite the fact that the
zero determiner is the single determiner most frequently occurring with people (as can be seen in
Table 9). The zero determiner also has a strong negative association with the plural noun things
(8.47) and with the concrete uncountable noun money (2.33), but a strong positive association
with the abstract uncountable noun poverty (120.88) and the concrete countable noun women
(2.76). The repulsion between the zero determiner and things, between the zero determiner and
money, and between demonstratives and money is interesting in the light of the attraction between
demonstratives and things, and between possessives and money. Inclusion of more nouns in the
co-varying collexeme analysis would shed more light on determiner choice in the corpus.
However, for the purposes of this investigation, the data analysis is sufficient to illustrate contexts
in which some is preferred over the zero determiner in BSAfE. Performing similar collexeme
analyses on corpora of other varieties of English will help determine to which extent determiner
choice phenomena are specific to BSAfE. Such comparison warrants future investigation.
6.
Conclusion
This study has attempted to move beyond the listing of uses of the determiner some in BSAfE
with words it is incompatible with in contemporary standard English, such as few and certain,
and to explore the possibility that the core meaning of some („particular, unspecified
quantity‟) is extended to more grammatical uses in BSAfE. In the case of wider usage
potential one would expect higher frequency, but a comparison of the BSAfE data with two
other varieties (Indian English and Kenyan English) shows that the determiner some is
significantly less frequent in both African corpora compared with the Indian English corpus.
However, some is more frequently a determiner of plural nouns in the BSAfE corpus
compared with the other two corpora.
The nouns with which the determiner some most strongly collocates in the BSAfE corpus are
mostly plural nouns. Among these collocations with plural nouns, evidence of the extended,
grammaticalised use of this determiner with plural nouns can be found. However, the corpus
is very small, and therefore the data too sparse, to make any quantitative claims about the
extended usage of determinative some in BSAfE.
A co-varying collexeme analysis considering all possible determiner-slot fillers in relation to
five very frequent nouns in the corpus shows large collocational strength between the zero
determiner and plural nouns, but this association is negative in the case of the nouns things
and people. The strong attraction between the plural noun people and the determiner some is
confirmed in the co-varying collexeme analysis. It may well be that other varieties of English
show similar attractions between some and people, or between certain other nouns and
determiners, and further investigations into conventionalised choices of certain determiners
with certain nouns are necessary.7
The qualitative and quantitative evidence suggests that most so-called “non-standard” uses of
the determiner some can be explained in terms of an extension of the core meaning of some in
7
I am indebted to the reviewer who pointed this out.
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The uses of some as determiner in BSAfE
107
all three registers of BSAfE under investigation, but the quantitative data is not large enough to
argue conclusively for a more advanced grammaticalisation of some in BSAfE, and evidence of
this in the professional writing component is especially scarce. The scarcity of evidence in the
professional writing component may partly be due to editorial intervention in which case it is
not truly conventionalised and may be restricted to informal contexts (Kruger and Van Rooy
under revision). However, the professional writing component in this study was very small and
further investigation of larger bodies of professional writing is needed to establish the extent to
which the article-like use of some is accepted in contexts where it might be omitted.
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The uses of some as determiner in BSAfE
109
APPENDIX
Table 6: Collostructional strength of nouns with determiner some in BSAfE Conversation8 9
Noun
people
children’s
places
skills
classes
words
courses
weeks
orders
meetings
reason
place
families
Frequency in
subcorpus
1068
3
39
15
12
52
3
15
5
7
32
144
12
Number of
occurrences with
determiner some
34
3
6
4
3
5
2
3
2
2
3
6
2
Collocational
strength
7.55
5.88
5.39
4.74
3.57
3.57
3.44
3.26
2.92
2.61
2.28
2.27
2.13
Table 7: Collostructional strength of nouns with determiner some in BSAfE Student Writing
Noun
people
extent
instances
colleagues
cases
distance
animal
newspapers
money
countries
ladies
Frequency in
subcorpus
1049
9
5
3
32
5
6
8
257
162
13
Number of
occurrences with
determiner some
48
6
3
2
4
2
2
2
8
6
2
Collocational
strength
17.89
10.01
4.96
3.49
3.48
2.97
2.8
2.54
2.25
2.15
2.11
8
p < 0.001 where collocational strength > 3 and p < 0.01 where collocational strength > 2.
In Tables 6, 7 and 8, nouns that are semantically plural are in bold, and uncountable nouns are in italics. Also
see Footnote 5 regarding the morphology of these nouns.
9
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Table 8: Collostructional strength of nouns with determiner some in BSAfE Professional Writing
Noun
cases
degree
kind
financials
staffers
impetus
recourse
way
aspect
authors
situations
suppliers
Frequency in
subcorpus
20
7
11
1
1
2
2
42
3
3
3
3
Number of
occurrences with
determiner some
3
2
2
1
1
1
1
2
1
1
1
1
Collocational
strength
4.63
3.79
3.37
2.55
2.55
2.25
2.25
2.2
2.07
2.07
2.07
2.07
Table 9: Raw frequencies of determiner (types) with five non-singular nouns in BSAfE corpus
a/an/no
both
Demonstratives
we/us/you
Quantifiers/Numerals
other
Possessives
some
the/such
all
any
ø
certain/exact/specific
Totals
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Total per noun across all three registers
people
money
things
women
poverty
11
23
2
2
4
1
0
0
0
0
194
23
129
23
13
8
0
0
0
0
197
42
35
17
3
64
0
19
4
0
45
32
16
1
3
82
12
11
5
0
434
85
68
23
22
12
0
2
0
0
2
1
1
0
0
1179
277
231
192
752
1
0
9
0
0
2230
495
523
267
797
42
1
382
8
294
87
97
110
632
14
4
2631
10
4312
The uses of some as determiner in BSAfE
111
Table 10: Collostructional strength between determiners and selected nouns
w2 =
noun
ø
poverty
Demonstratives things
the/such
people
a/an/no
money
Quantifiers/
Numerals
people
Possessives
money
some
people
other
people
ø
women
ø
people
the/such
poverty
Quantifiers/
poverty
Numerals
Demonstratives poverty
ø
things
Possessives
poverty
Demonstratives money
a/an/no
people
the/such
women
ø
money
obs.
exp.
w1_w2 w1_w2
in_NP in_NP
752 489.69
129
51.79
434 321.03
23
4.73
delta.p delta.p
constr word Collocato
to
tional
word constr strength
0.25
0.4 120.88
0.22
0.15
25.92
0.21
0.1
22.16
0.44
0.04
11.27
freq
w1
2701
382
632
42
freq
w2
797
596
2233
495
294
97
110
87
2701
2701
632
2233
495
2233
2233
275
2233
797
197
32
82
64
192
1179
22
149.34
10.92
55.88
44.19
168.97
1372
114.58
+
+
+
+
+
-
0.17
0.22
0.24
0.23
0.02
-0.19
-0.17
0.04
0.05
0.02
0.02
0.09
-0.18
-0.14
8.35
8.17
6.66
4.99
2.76
32.63
32.05
294
382
2701
97
382
42
632
2701
797
797
596
797
495
2233
275
495
3
13
301
3
23
11
23
277
53.3
69.26
366.2
17.59
43.01
21.33
39.54
304.14
-
-0.18
-0.16
-0.06
-0.15
-0.06
-0.25
-0.03
-0.03
-0.08
-0.09
-0.13
-0.02
-0.05
-0.01
-0.06
-0.06
21.75
19.07
8.47
5.23
3.69
3.01
2.89
2.33
+
+
+
+
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