Divergent Grammatical Trajectories of Data, Criteria, and Phenomena: A Corpus-Based Study
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Abstract
Standard English grammar traditionally classifies data, criteria, and phenomena as the plural forms of datum, criterion, and phenomenon, respectively. However, contemporary usage frequently deviates from this prescription, showing a distinct tendency toward singularization. Based on the analyses of tokens from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) spanning from 1990 to 2019, this paper argues that these loanwords are undergoing two divergent grammatical shifts rather than a uniform process of simplification. Quantitative findings reveal that data exhibits a rapid and robust shift toward singular usage across Fiction, Newspaper, and Magazine registers, whereas criteria and phenomena retain a stronger adherence to traditional plural forms. Furthermore, qualitative concordance analyses demonstrate that data is predominantly evolving into a mass noun, evidenced by its exclusive compatibility with mass-selecting determiners (e.g., much data) and unitizing partitives. Conversely, criteria and phenomena are being re-atomized as singular count nouns, indicated by their reliance on singular count determiners (e.g., a criteria). Consequently, this study challenges the rigid prescriptive view of these nouns, suggesting that their semantic reconceptualization drives them along distinct trajectories: data as an unbounded aggregate and criteria and phenomena as discrete, countable entities.
Keywords:
loanwords, grammatical number, corpus linguistics, language change, mass-count distinctionReferences
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