June 14, 2004

Dealing with these type situations

Listening to C-SPAN with half an ear the other day, I heard some retired general saying something like "... in this type situation, we..."

It occurred to me to wonder: what part of speech is type, in this construction? The plural form "these type situations" makes type seem more like an adjective or quantifier than a noun; but then we also have "these type of situations" along with (the expected form) "these types of situations."

Curiously, we don't seem to get "*this kind situation" or "*these kind situations", but we do get "these kind of situations".

Some examples:

You're a Taurian, you will have faced this type situation many times before ...
Animal Control Officers must deal with vicious and wild animals. Do you feel you could handle this type situation?
Also, officer safety suggestions for dealing with these type individuals will be discussed and resources available to departments dealing with these type situations.
If you have any doubts concerning these type situations, discuss with your immediate supervisor.
A dietitian can be very helpful in these type of situations to make sure that your body receives all of its nutrients.
It also makes sense to have free Iraqi forces and interpreters there to talk to people in the vehicles, so you don't get in these type of situations.
Also, successful supplier/vendors needs to invest in training of manpower for these kind of situations.
We are improving error reporting in these kind of situations (and also, you will be able to save even if the document is not valid).

As you can see in these examples (and others easily available on the web), these type constructions are used by native speakers -- though I don't use them myself, other than as a joke, either in speech or in writing. Furthermore, the contexts of use seem to be more formal rather than less formal. In fact, my stereotype for this pattern is someone who is not highly literate and is trying to speak or write formally and clearly. What might have been "stuff like this" in a less formal context comes out as "this type stuff".

That's just a conjecture, but here are some Google counts for various words in various relevant patterns. I'll mostly leave interpretation for another day, except to point out that the solecism "these kind of things" is about 1/4 as common as the correct "these kinds of things".

One curious thing, though: compare the counts for "these types of Xs" and "these kinds of Xs" in the second table. They're almost identical, so much so that I thought at first I must have screwed up transferring the numbers to the table. But I checked, and that's really what Google is telling me. Is this because type and kind are really in such an exact numerical balance in this case? or is it this telling us something weird about Google's strategy for encoding strings and counting hits?

 
this type X
this type of X
 Ratio
 
whG
whG/bp
whG
whG/bp
  
situation
902
210
55,100

12,858

61
guy
4
0.9
911
213
228
idea
5
1.2
580
135
116
thing
871
203
77,000
17,969
88
individual
94
22
4,280
999
46
person
598
140
12,400
2,894
21
woman
36
8.4
922
215
26
man
143*
-
1,970
460
-
circumstance
12
2.8
580
135
43
car
326
76
13,900
3244
43
vehicle
223
52
6,890
1608
31
automobile
18
4.2
536
125
30
truck
44
10
917
214
21
bicycle
17
4.0
736
172
43
bike
22
5.1
741
173
34

*skewed by phrases like "To do this, type man command at the system prompt".

 

(whG in
all cells)
(A)
these type Xs
(B)
these types of Xs
(C)
these type of Xs
(D)
these kind Xs
(E)
these kinds of Xs

(F)

these kind of Xs
situations
383
27,300
1,810
4
27,100
2,340
guys
67
1,780
603
*
1,770
749
ideas
15
2,690
109
1
2,690
780
things
1,590
81,300
5,330
*
81,000
20,500
individuals
54
2,080
218
*
2,080
96
people
500
18,900
4,230
*
18,900
7,350
women
43
593
348
*
596
296
men
62
1,850
622
*
1,850
752
circumstances
16
2,880
178
0
2,880
518
cars
176
5,060
725
2
5,050
517
vehicles
14
3,640
459
0
3,590
102
trucks
14
199
36
0
160
46
bicycles
10
247
29
0
243
45
bikes
24
396
55
0
294
145

*counts dominated by kind = nice

A few other relevant (and real) examples:

This is exactly the type thing I'm looking for.
List owners often describe the type things that are allowed and not allowed on their lists.
I support the troops and all, but it is not my type thing.
And, one of your type things is that you have to build up in yourself that you are tougher, you can take it, this is why you are here.
Do you think it depends on how many type things have to fit in the store and which products make the most money?
This is a type thing that the Zoning regulations need to deal with for the sake of all property values.

Here's an idea -- maybe the source is pairings like

a joke-type thing a joke type of thing
a 1980s-type thing a 1980s type of thing
moth-type things moth type of things
just a few admin-type things just a few admin type of things   

which relate structures like ((moth type) things) and (moth ((type (of things)). The plausibility of this connection is increased by the fact that we don't get "*some moth-kind things."

But in "moth-type things", type could be the head of a compound noun, an option that's not available in "these type things". And this still doesn't really help with "these kind of things", "these type of things" -- or for that matter "a few admin type of things" -- where it seems that "type" is semantically plural even though it's morphologically singular

Someone has probably straightened all this out in a CLS paper or the like -- I await enlightenment.

[Update: as pf emailed to point out, Hawaiian pidgin has developed kind (spelled "kine") along the same lines as type in "standard non-standard" English, producing examples like "fun kine stuffs". ]

Posted by Mark Liberman at June 14, 2004 02:26 PM