The Integration of MILLION into the English System of Number Words

MacQueen finished nearly 40 years of teaching English at Uppsala University, Sweden, in 2006 and is now back home in Michigan. He long noticed that Swedish, like French and German, uses the equivalent of "three millions dollar," pluralizing exactly the wrong word according to English. The advent of large-scale data storage in the early 1990s allowed him to study in great detail how the word million came to mean what it does and to be used in the form it is, and shares his findings. He discusses his material and methods, morphosyntactic and semantic analysis, heuristic macroanalysis of noun phrases in million in Modern English corpora, very-large-scale quantitative analysis of the key variable--2+millions versus 2+million, and factors accelerating and retarding change. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

The Author: Donald Sims MacQueen was born in Dearborn, Michigan (USA). He graduated from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1967. He was a foreign lecturer at the Uppsala University Department of English in Sweden from 1969 to 2006 and was director of undergraduate studies there from 1993 to 2001. The author holds a Ph.D. in English linguistics from Uppsala University.