From leaf to flower and from flower to fruit

Transposition of the category of number

Firstly, the noun forms may express augmentation and diminution of plurality, characteristic of oral communication, and it presents a point of stylistic interest here.

There are intensive plurals: It was years ago; You've done it loads of times.

There are also diminutive plurals: Seconds later you came in; He will leave within minutes.

The plural form is more informal: I am friends with him.

A lot and lots of are both used informally without any difference of meaning, lots of being perhaps ever slightly more colloquial: There are a lot of things we don't notice. There are lots of things I don't bring up.

Secondly, a ccording to the category of number, nouns are classified into countable and uncountable. Each group has its own regularities of usage. When these regularities are broken for stylistic reasons, speech becomes expressive. Uncountable singularia tantum nouns, or countable nouns in the singular, occasionally realizing the meaning of more than oneness, evoke picturesque connotations.

The use of a singular noun instead of an appropriate plural form creates a generalized, elevated effect often bordering on symbolization.

The faint fresh flame of the young year flushes

And fruit and leaf are as gold and fire. (Swinburn)

The contrary device— the use of plural instead of singular —as a rule makes the description more powerful and large-scale.

The clamour of waters, snows, winds, rains… (Hemingway) The lone and level sands stretch far away. (Shelly)

The plural form of an abstract noun, whose lexical meaning is alien to the notion of number makes it not only more expressive, but brings about what V. Vinogradov called aesthetic semantic growth.

Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meannesses, that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. (Greene)

Thus one feeling is represented as a number of emotional states, each with a certain connotation of a new meaning. Emotions may signify concrete events, happenings, and doings.

Proper names employed as plural lend the narration a unique gener­alizing effect:

If you forget to invite somebody’s Aunt Millie, I want to be able to say I had nothing to do with it.

There were numerous Aunt Millies because of, and in spite of Arthur’s and Edith’s triple checking of the list. (O’Hara)

These examples represent the type of grammatical metaphor formed by the transposition of the lexical and grammatical meanings.

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