data - a plural subject?

Some British and UN academic, scientific and professional style guides[2] request that authors treat data as a plural noun. Other international organizations, such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society,[3] allow its usage as either a mass noun or plural based on author preference. The Air Force Flight Test Center, in its publication The Author's Guide to Writing Air Force Flight Test Center Technical Reports specifically states that the word data is always plural, never singular.

Data is now often treated as a singular mass noun in informal usage, but usage in scientific publications shows a divide between the United States and United Kingdom. In the United States the word data is sometimes used in the singular, though scientists and science writers more often maintain the traditional plural usage. Some major newspapers such as the New York Times use it alternately in the singular or plural. In the New York Times the phrases "the survey data are still being analyzed" and "the first year for which data is available" have appeared on the same day. In scientific writing data is often treated as a plural, as in These data do not support the conclusions, but many people now think of data as a singular mass entity like information and use the singular in general usage."[4] British usage now widely accepts treating data as singular in standard English,[5] including everyday newspaper usage[6] at least in non-scientific use.[7] UK scientific publishing still prefers treating it as a plural.[8] Some UK university style guides recommend using data for both singular and plural use[9] and some recommend treating it only as a singular in connection with computers.[10]

Ten thousand lemmings can't possibly be wrong.

I am sorry JTT... the "number of hits on Google" argument is simply too ridiculous to debate seriously.

Re: ebrown p (Post 3695640)
Quote:

I am sorry JTT... the "number of hits on Google" argument is simply too ridiculous to debate seriously.



Why would you say that, Ebrown?

Results 1 - 10 of about 608,000 for 9/11 commision report true.
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Results 1 - 10 of about 3,310,000 for Dinosaurs lived with man.
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Results 1 - 10 of about 7,110,000 for Dick Cheney Good.
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Results 1 - 10 of about 6,680,000 for George W. Bush intelligent.
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Results 1 - 10 of about 1,610,000 for Sarah Palin Intelligent.
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All right. What are you saying? That 'data' is not the plural of 'datum'?

M-W
data

usage Data leads a life of its own quite independent of datum, of which it was originally the plural. It occurs in two constructions: as a plural noun (like earnings), taking a plural verb and plural modifiers (as these, many, a few) but not cardinal numbers, and serving as a referent for plural pronouns; and as an abstract mass noun (like information), taking a singular verb and singular modifiers (as this, much, little), and being referred to by a singular pronoun. Both constructions are standard. The plural construction is more common in print, perhaps because the house style of some publishers mandates it.

Or that subject/verb agreement is a 'prescriptive' myth and a bit of nonsense? I don't understand the point you're trying to make.

Roger wrote: Sooner or later, this discussion will probably be reported as hits on google. Both ways.

That's exactly what I'm saying, Merry and it shows in the way the people who speak English have chosen to use it.

If we were to delete the mandated uses of data I strongly suspect that what we'd find is that data would end up just like information, ie. it would follow natural rules of English.

I am a native English speaker. I use plural nouns all the time. I have often heard the word "data" used as a plural noun by native English speakers in common (non-written) speech.

I am curious about the "Natural Rules of English". As a native English speaker, perhaps I should be a bit ashamed that I am unfamiliar with these "Natural Rules".

Do you have a link?

The contradiction begins in the fact that the words "rule" and "grammar" have very different meanings to a scientist and to a layperson. The rules people learn (or more likely, fail to learn) in school are called [prescriptive] rules, prescribing how one "ought" to talk.

This is exactly what's happening with 'data'. Spurious, unnatural rules are being foisted upon people in order to make them use something in an unnatural manner, ie. against the rules that we all know, intuitively, guide our language. What English rule is it that tells us 'data' is plural?


Scientists studying language propose [descriptive] rules, describing how people [do] talk -- the way to determine whether a construction is "grammatical" is to find people who speak the language and ask them. Prescriptive and descriptive grammar are completely different things, and there is a good reason that scientists focus on the descriptive rules.

Obviously, you need to build in some kind of rules, but what kind? Prescriptive rules? Imagine trying to build a talking machine by designing it to obey rules like "Don't split infinitives" or "Never begin a sentence with [because]."

It would just sit there. In fact, we already have machines that don't split infinitives; they're called screwdrivers, bathtubs, cappuccino- makers, and so on. Prescriptive rules are useless without the much more fundamental rules that create the sentences to begin with. These rules are never mentioned in style manuals or school grammars because the authors correctly assume that anyone capable of reading the manuals must already have the rules. No one, not even a valley girl, has to be told not to say [Apples the eat boy] or [Who did you meet John and?] or the vast, vast majority of the trillions of mathematically possible combinations of words. So when a scientist considers all the high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

So there is no contradiction, after all, in saying that every normal person can speak grammatically (in the sense of systematically) and ungrammatically (in the sense of nonprescriptively), just as there is no contradiction in saying that a taxi obeys the laws of physics but breaks the laws of Massachusetts.

But still, this raises a question. Someone, somewhere, must be making decisions about "correct English" for the rest of us. Who? There is no English Language Academy, and this is just as well; the purpose of the Acade'mie Francaise is to amuse journalists from other countries with bitterly-argued decisions that the French gaily ignore. Nor was there any English Language Constitutional Conference at the beginning of time. The legislators of "correct English," in fact, are an informal network of copy-editors, dictionary usage panelists, style manual writers, English teachers, essayists, and pundits. Their authority, they claim, comes from their dedication to implementing standards that have served the language well in the past, especially in the prose of its finest writers, and that maximize its clarity, logic, consistency, elegance, precision, stability, and expressive range. William Safire, who writes the weekly column "On Language" for the [New York Times Magazine], calls himself a "language maven," from the Yiddish word meaning expert, and this gives us a convenient label for the entire group.

To whom I say: Maven, shmaven! [Kibbitzers] and [nudniks] is more like it. For here are the remarkable facts. Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago and have perpetuated themselves ever since. For as long as they have existed, speakers have flouted them, spawning identical plaints about the imminent decline of the language century after century. All the best writers in English have been among the flagrant flouters. The rules conform neither to logic nor tradition, and if they were ever followed they would force writers into fuzzy, clumsy, wordy, ambiguous, incomprehensible prose, in which certain thoughts are not expressible at all. Indeed, most of the "ignorant errors" these rules are supposed to correct display an elegant logic and an acute sensitivity to the grammatical texture of the language, to which the mavens are oblivious.

Thank you for renewing my faith in Google