Dougald McLaurin III Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary SBL Paper Presentation, December 8 th , 2020 dmclaurin@sebts.edu Defining Collective Nouns: How Cognitive Linguistics Can Help Hebrew Grammarians All Hebrew grammars have something to say about collective nouns, and yet, they remain a mystery to us. I will not cover the litany of definitions from Hebrew grammars in this presentation. In general, however, previous definitions can be summarized along these lines “a collective noun is a noun which has a singular form that refers to a group of real-world entities.” 1 Yet, this simple definition can be misleading since it does not do justice to the complexity of grammatical and syntactical relationship that involve the category of number. Many of us may say with Ian Young concerning collective nouns, “…that it is not possible to find a convincing grammatical explanation for the use of singular and plural in every single case.” 2 I believe that cognitive linguistics forms a better definition that will help us express the complexity of collectives. I will argue that collective nouns are a varied group of nouns. Some focus on a group of real-world entities as a whole, others focus on the members of the group, and others may, in different syntactical situations, refer to either the group or its members. By adopting this threefold definition, I will argue that in order to better understand collective nouns, we need to exclude two types of nouns that have previously been included in our discussion concerning collectives. Specifically, these are mass nouns and proper nouns. Then, I will apply 11 “A common noun that denotes classes or groups made up of many individual members, e.g. herd, cattle, forest, etc.” Christo H. J. van der Merwe, Jacobus A. Naudé, and Jan H. Kroeze, A Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar, 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017), 53; See also, Waltke and O’Conner, who state, “With collective the singular designates a group...A collective singular may not agree in number with other words in the sentence syntactically related to it.” Bruce K. Waltke and M. O’Conner, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990), § 7.2.1b; Joüon states, “The collective noun properly speaking designates a plurality of individuals as forming a group.” Paul Joüon, A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, trans. T. Muraoka, Subsidia Biblica 14 (Roma: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1996), § 135b; “A singular word may refer to a group of people (e.g., ﬠַ ם'people’) or a group of things (e.g. בָּ קָ ר'cattle’).” He goes on to note that “Some singular words indicate either a singular item or a collective, depending on the context (e.g. ﬠֵ ץ‘a tree’ or 'a group of trees’).” Ronald J. Williams, Williams’ Hebrew Syntax, 3rd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), § 2. 2 Ian Young, “Collectives: Biblical Hebrew,” Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics 1:476.