Measure phrases

In Middle English, nouns of time, space, weight, measure, and number (e.g. inch, foot, pound, year) tended not to be inflected in the plural, as can be seen in these lines from Sir Tristrem - a thirteenth-century verse romance:

Tristrem wan that day/Of him an hundred pounde.

This pattern persists in non-standard varieties of English; indeed Edwards et al. claim that 'it is almost a universal rule that, after numerals, nouns of measurement and quantity retain their singular form' (1984: 114). It is therefore not surprising that RTG contains examples of this phenomenon.

(1) I also won over a hundred pound playing bingo the same day (2018)

(2) And McGeady is about three foot tall (2019)

(3) About four or five year ago Prescott tried to force through a north eastern regional assembly (2014)

While uninflected quantitative nouns in these contexts are proscribed in Standard English, they are sometimes permissible in other Germanic dialects, including standardized ones. For example, the German translation of the Spanish language film Tres metros sobre el cielo ('three metres above heaven') is Drei Meter über dem Himmel.

Another aspect of measure phrases shared between NEE and other Germanic dialects (but not Standard English) is shown in these RTG examples.

(4) I’ve landed mesel in a bit bother with all this (2019)

(5) Two grown men hitting a bit rubber over a fence with a bit string (2016)

(6) Had a good bit crack with him after the game (2018)

Here, of is absent after the noun bit where it would be present in SE. The SED records this phenomenon for Nb and Du, for example: a bit string, a bit brown sugar, a bit feed, a bit cake, a good bit money (Orton and Halliday 1962-3). 'Partitive' constructions with of arose in the Middle English period, when the genitive inflection was replaced with the of-phrase, possibly with support from French possessive de, so that Old English an bite brædess becomes a bit of bread (Traugott 2010: 42). The absence of of in NEE might be an echo of this earlier 'native' structure, which is to be found in other Germanic dialects, including Dutch (een beetje brood) and German (ein bisschen Brot).

References

Edwards, Viv, Peter Trudgill and Bert Weltens. 1984. The Grammar of English Dialect: A Survey of Research. London: Economic and Social Research Council.

Orton, Harold and Wilfrid Halliday. 1962-1963. Survey of English Dialects (B) the Basic Material. Vol. 1, The Six Northern Counties and the Isle of Man Parts I-III. Leeds: E. J. Arnold and Son.

Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2010. (Inter)subjectivity and (Inter)subjectification: A Reassessment. In Subjectification, Intersubjectivication and Grammaticalization, edited by Kristin Davidse, Lieven Vandelanotte, and Hubert Cuyckens, 29-71. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton.