Verbal Agreement with Collective Nominal Constructions: Syntactic and Semantic Determinants

Authors

  • Yolanda Fernández-Pena Departamento de Filoloxía Inglesa, Francesa e Alemá. Facultade de Filoloxía e Tradución. Universidade de Vigo

Abstract

This corpus-based study investigates the patterns of verbal agreement of twenty-three singular collective nouns which take of-dependents (e.g., a group of boys, a set of points). The main goal is to explore the influence exerted by the of-PP on verb number. To this end, syntactic factors, such as the plural morphology of the oblique noun (i.e., the noun in the of-PP) and syntactic distance, as well as semantic issues, such as the animacy or humanness of the oblique noun within the of-PP, were analysed. The data show the strongly conditioning effect of plural of-dependents on the number of the verb: they favour a significant proportion of plural verbal forms. This preference for plural verbal patterns, however, diminishes considerably with increasing syntactic distance when the of-PP contains a non-overtly-marked plural noun such as people. The results for the semantic issues explored here indicate that animacy and humanness are also relevant factors as regards the high rate of plural agreement observed in these constructions.


Keywords: agreement; collective; of-PP; distance; animacy; corpus

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Yolanda Fernández-Pena, Departamento de Filoloxía Inglesa, Francesa e Alemá. Facultade de Filoloxía e Tradución. Universidade de Vigo

Yolanda Fernández-Pena is a PhD (FPU) researcher in the Language Variation and Textual Categorisation (LVTC) research group at the University of Vigo (Spain). Her research focuses on the linguistic variation of verbal agreement with collective nouns taking of-dependents in Late Modern and Present-Day English. She has presented the preliminary results of her investigation in national and international conferences—organised by the Spanish Association for English and American Studies (AEDEAN), the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) and the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE)—and has published her results in conference proceedings and international, peer-reviewed journals, such as Corpora and Varieng.

References

Acuña-Fariña, J. Carlos. 2009. “The Linguistics and Psycholinguistics of Agreement: A Tutorial Overview.” Lingua 119 (3): 389-424.

—. 2012. “Agreement, Attraction and Architectural Opportunism.” Journal of Linguistics 48 (2): 257-95.

Barlow, Michael. 1999. “Agreement as a Discourse Phenomenon.” Folia Linguistica 33 (2): 187-210.

Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.

Bock, Kathryn, Sally Butterfield, Anne Cutler, J. Cooper Cutting, Kathleen M. Eberhard and Karin R. Humphreys. 2006. “Number Agreement in British and American English: Disagreeing to Agree Collectively.” Language 82 (1): 64-113.

Bock, Kathryn and Kathleen M. Eberhard. 1993. “Meaning, Sound and Syntax in English Number Agreement.” Language and Cognitive Processes 8 (1): 87-99.

Bock, Kathryn, Kathleen M. Eberhard, J. Cooper Cutting, Antje S. Meyer and Herbert Schriefers. 2001. “Some Attractions of Verb Agreement.” Cognitive Psychology 43 (2): 83-128.

Bock, Kathryn and Carol A. Miller. 1991. “Broken Agreement.” Cognitive Psychology 23 (1): 45-93.

Corbett, Greville G. 1979. “The Agreement Hierarchy.” Journal of English Linguistics 15 (2): 203-224.

—. 2006. Agreement. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Davies, Mark. 2004-. BYU-BNC. (Based on the British National Corpus from Oxford University Press). 100 million words. 1980s-1993. [Accessed online on June 5, 2013].

—. 2008. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 520 million words, 1990-present. [Accessed online on October 9, 2013].

Dekeyser, Xavier. 1975. Number and Case Relations in 19th c. British English: A Comparative Study of Grammar and Usage. Amsterdam: De Nederlandsche Boekhandel.

Depraetere, Ilse. 2003. “On Verbal Concord with Collective Nouns in British English.” English Language and Linguistics 7 (1): 85-127.

Fernández-Pena, Yolanda. 2015. “Verbal Agreement with Collective Noun-Based Constructions. Syntactic and Lexical Implications of Of-dependents.” In English and American Studies in Spain. New Developments and Trends, edited by Alberto Lázaro Lafuente and María Dolores Porto Requejo, 206-217. Alcalá de Henares: University of Alcalá.

—. forthcoming. “Patterns of Verbal Agreement with Collective Nouns Taking Plural Of-dependents: A Corpus-based Analysis of Syntactic Distance.” To appear in Corpora 12 (2), 2017.

Haskell, Todd R. and Maryellen C. MacDonald. 2003. “Conflicting Cues and Competition in Subject-Verb Agreement.” Journal of Memory and Language 48 (4): 760-778.

Huddleston, Rodney, Geoffrey K. Pullum et al. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Hundt, Marianne. 2006. “The Committee has/have Decided…: On Concord Patterns with Collective Nouns in Inner- and Outer-Varieties of English.” Journal of English Linguistics 34 (3): 206-232.

—. 2009. “Concord with Collective Nouns in Australian and New Zealand English.” In Comparative Studies in Australian and New Zealand English: Grammar and Beyond, edited by Pam Peters, Peter Collins and Adam Smith, 207-224. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Levin, Beth. 1993. English Verb Classes and Alternations. Chicago: The U of Chicago P.

Levin, Magnus. 2001. Agreement with Collective Nouns in English. Lund: Lund Studies in English.

—. 2006. “Collective Nouns and Language Change.” English Language and Linguistics 10 (2): 321-343.

Steele, Susan. 1978. “Word Order Variation: A Typological Study.” In Universals of Human Language. vol. 4: Syntax, edited by Joseph H. Greenberg, Charles A. Ferguson and Edith A. Moravcsik, 585-623. Stanford: Stanford UP.

The British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML Edition). 2007. Distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium. 100 million words. 1960s-1993. [Accessed online on May 10, 2013].

Downloads

Additional Files

Published

2017-06-23

How to Cite

Fernández-Pena, Y. (2017). Verbal Agreement with Collective Nominal Constructions: Syntactic and Semantic Determinants. Atlantis. Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies, 39(1), 33–54. Retrieved from https://www.atlantisjournal.org/index.php/atlantis/article/view/304

Issue

2017: Vol. 39, Num. 1

Section

Articles

License

The authors retain copyright of articles. They authorise AEDEAN to publish them in its journal Atlantis and to include them in the indexing and abstracting services, academic databases and repositories the journal participates in.

Under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), for non-commercial (i.e., personal or academic) purposes only, users are free to share (i.e., copy and redistribute in any medium or format) and adapt (i.e., remix, transform and build upon) articles published in Atlantis, free of charge and without obtaining prior permission from the publisher or the author(s), as long as they give appropriate credit to the author, the journal (Atlantis) and the publisher (AEDEAN), provide the relevant URL link to the original publication and indicate if changes were made. Such attribution may be done in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the journal endorses the user or their use of the material published therein. Users who adapt (i.e., remix, transform or build upon the material) must distribute their contributions under the same licence as the original.

Self-archiving is also permitted, so that authors are allowed to deposit the published PDF version of their articles in academic and/or institutional repositories, without fee or embargo. Authors may also post their individual articles on their personal websites, again on condition that the original link to the online edition is provided.

Authors are expected to know and heed basic ground rules that preclude simultaneous submission and/or duplicate publication. Prospective contributors to Atlantis commit themselves to the following when they submit a manuscript:

  • That no concurrent consideration of the same, or almost identical, work by any other journal and/or publisher is taking place.
  • That the potential contribution has not appeared previously, in any form whatsoever, in another journal, electronic format or as a chapter/section of a book.

Seeking permission for the use of copyright material is the responsibility of the author.