‘He wanted to think of the audience as an anonymous mass, not as individuals well known to him.’ (FLOB, P16)
1. Introduction
One of the issues concerning the use of nouns, i.e. noun phrases in English is that of countability. Speakers of English may perceive a referent, to which a particular linguistic expression refers, as a countable group of things or individuals, or just as an uncountable entity. Downing & Locke (2006: 420ff.) claim that the reason for the existence of this semantic contrast can be found in the way English speakers experience things, and that the contrast is necessary for successful communication. When the semantic contrast of this kind exists in a language, it is often followed by certain morphological, lexical, and syntactic contrasts, i.e. these linguistic contrasts reflect the difference in the semantic perception. Collective nouns are in the core of this issue given that they can be used to refer either to a collection of individuals that is countable or to an uncountable entity. The basic difference between collective nouns and other types of nouns is that collectives can take a singular or a plural verb when they are in the singular, and also ‘as pronoun coreferents either singular it and relative which or plural they and relative who without change of number in the noun’ (Quirk et al. 1985: 316; italics in original) as illustrated in:
(1) a. The jury has gathered and it has announced the winners.
b. The jury have gathered and they have announced the winners.
Here we can see that in (1a) the singular form of the verb is used to emphasise the jury as a whole, whereas in (1b) the plural form of the verb is used to emphasise individual members of the jury. There are several reasons influencing the variation in verbal and pronominal agreement with collective nouns in English in general. One of them relates to different uses of these nouns in different varieties of English. Quirk et al. (ibid.: 758f.) note that ‘AmE generally treats singular collective nouns as singular. Terms for the government and for sports teams are nearly always treated as singular in AmE, but other terms may (less commonly than in BrE) take plural verbs’, and Huddleston & Pullum (2002: 502) similarly claim that ‘[t]he plural version is more common in BrE than in AmE’.
This essay serves as a corpus-based analysis of possible similarities and disparities in verbal and pronominal agreement with collective nouns in British and American English on the basis of the data and results obtained from the Frown Corpus (written American English) and the FLOB Corpus (written British English). On the basis of the aforementioned claims concerning the nature of collective nouns, the general working hypothesis in this essay is that singular agreement will be more frequent than plural agreement in both corpora, but also that plural agreement will occur more frequently in British than in American texts.
2. Discussion.
The following discussion is divided into three subsections: the subsection 2.1 provides a theoretical background dealing with collective nouns and their classification and with the notion of agreement or concord; the subsection 2.2 explains the methodology and corpora used for this analysis, while the subsection 2.3 provides an analysis of the data from the Frown and FLOB Corpora.
2.1 Theoretical Background.
In order to define collective nouns, sometimes also referred to as nouns of multitude, we have to consider both semantic and morphosyntactic criteria due to the fact that the difference in meaning of collectives plays a crucial role in the way they are formally represented. Hence a collective noun may be described as ‘a morphologically singular noun with multiple reference that is compatible with a plural verb’ (Depraetere 2003: 86). For instance, if we compare the expressions the crew is and the crew are, we will notice that there is a difference in the semantic point of view and that the same collective noun can have both singular and plural properties. However, It should be borne in mind that collective nouns can also have plural forms represented by the addition of the plural suffix ‘s (e.g. crews, governments), but in contrast to singular forms, these plural forms of collectives normally take pronouns they and who and plural verbs.
Collective nouns have been classified differently depending on the semantic, morphological, and semantic criteria taken into account. Also, it is not altogether straightforward to establish exact boundaries of collective nouns considering that it is not always clear whether particular nouns do belong to this group.
One the basis of the requirement of animacy of collective nouns, Cruse (1986: 176) makes a distinction between: groups (e.g. family) which consist of humans ‘who have a purpose or a function’, classes (e.g. aristocracy) which consist ‘of humans justified more by the possession of common attributes’, and collections (e.g. library) which are usually inanimate. Groups may take either a singular or a plural verb when they are used in the singular, classes normally appear in the singular and prefer plural verb agreement, while collections can be used either in the singular or plural but when they are in the singular they cannot have plural verb agreement.
Persson (1989: 179) distinguishes between three types of collectives: the generic (e.g. the public), the specific (e.g. club), and the unique collective nouns (e.g. the Vatican). Persson (ibid.: 182ff.) provides an analysis of collectives which is semantically motivated. He argues that the two characteristics of these nouns are [+ mobility] and [+ volition], where the former is the principal criterion, whereas the latter is possible but not necessary. For instance, a club may be labelled by [+ mobility, + volition] because it is made up of members who can leave it if they are willing to. On the other hand, army may be labelled by [+ mobility, ” volition] because soldiers of which the army consists can move but they are normally not free to move as they wish. In his discussion of volition and mobility Persson does recognise that these characteristics cannot be attributed to every collective noun, for example race, since belonging to a particular race is not the matter of volition, and changing one’s race is not possible and hence has nothing to do with mobility, so he uses this as an argument to explain the fact that certain collective nouns do not have variable agreement, i.e. do not take both singular and plural form of the verb.
Finally, an interesting classification of collectives, which relies on both semantic and morphosyntactic criteria, can be found in Depraetere (2003: 88ff.). She classifies collectives first by taking into account semantic characteristics, and then by considering syntactic characteristics. Even though collectives may be perceived either as units or as collections of individuals ‘not all collectives allow such a dual conceptualization as easily’ (Depraetere: ibid.). In this analysis, collective nouns are subdivided into three categories: collectives that have a dual nature, i.e. which can be thought of ‘in terms of shell or in terms of individuals’ (e.g. army, crew); collectives where the focus is on the unity or on the shell only (e.g. bureaucracy), and collectives where the focus is only on the individuals (e.g. people). Depraetere also argues that these three distinctions ‘may impact on verbal concord’, so the first subgroup of collectives can take either a singular or plural verb, the second subgroup prefers a singular verb, whereas the third subgroup prefers a plural verb. This classification appears to be very useful due to an obvious reason. The majority of grammars classify collective nouns into two classes on the basis of verbal concord: collectives that take either a singular or a plural verb, and collectives that take a plural verb only. However, grammars such as Quirk et al. (1985) also recognise a third class which includes those collectives that take a singular verb only (e.g. the press), and Depraetere’s classification is reliable because it combines these different approaches.
Besides these issues in the classification of collectives, an important notion that should also be mentioned is that of agreement or concord. According to Quirk et al. (1985: 755) agreement is ‘the relationship between two grammatical units such that one of them displays a particular feature (eg plurality) that accords with a displayed (or semantically implicit) feature in the other’. In a more general sense, the most important type of agreement in English is number agreement between the subject and the verb. But more specifically, we can distinguish between three types of agreement: grammatical, notional, and proximal (cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 757).
The notion of grammatical agreement reflects the fact that the verb agrees with the subject in number. It is obvious that, in order for subject-verb agreement to be detected, the form of the verb needs to show certain variations (e.g. they speak vs. he speaks). Therefore, in English, grammatical subject-verb agreement is not visible as far as modal verbs, verbs in the subjunctive and imperative are concerned. This type of agreement is expressed by verbs in the indicative, most often in the 3rd person.
Notional concord refers to ‘agreement of verb with subject according to the notion of number rather than with the actual presence of the grammatical marker for that notion’ (Quirk et al.: ibid.). Collective nouns are the central issue as far as notional agreement is concerned because some singular collectives are perceived as notionally plural. For instance, in British English, police normally takes the plural verb:
(2) Police are understood to be working on the theory that the man, possibly a member of an
IRA active service unit, was about to act as a bodyguard in a terrorist operation. (FLOB,
A24)
Huddleston & Pullum (2002: 502) note that notional agreement is in fact one of the most common overrides or violations of the grammatical agreement. This means that a singular collective noun may take either a singular or plural verb, which influences the meaning of the collective noun, as I have already explained above. Notional agreement has to do primarily with semantics which is the reason why Corbett (2000: 187) calls it semantic agreement.
Proximal agreement, or the principle of proximity, occurs when the verb does not agree with the head of the noun phrase functioning as subject but with its closest preceding noun phrase (cf. Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 501). For example, in:
(3) ? No one except her closest friends believe she is there now.
the head noun phrase No one is singular and therefore the whole noun phrase which is functioning as subject (No one except her closest friends) is singular. However, the noun phrase friends which occurs within the subject is immediately preceding the main verb and influences it, so the verb agrees with the closer NP which is in the plural, not with the subject NP which is in the singular.
Pronominal agreement is also very important as far as collective nouns are concerned. A particular pronoun (e.g. it, they) can refer to a collective noun in the sentence and in that way indicate whether the collective noun is perceived as singular or plural. Furthermore, pronominal agreement is not limited only to the sentence in which a collective noun appears. Pronouns may also appear in one sentence and refer to the collective noun that occurs in the preceding sentence, as will be seen in the analysis below.
Finally, the notion of mixed agreement can also be found in linguistic literature dealing with collective nouns. In general, mixed agreement occurs, for example, when the verb following a collective noun is in the singular but the pronoun, which also occurs in that sentence or in the following sentence and refers to the same collective noun, is in the plural. Mixed agreement will be discussed in the analysis only when such instances occur in the course of analysing the corpora. When they are not mentioned, that will mean that such instances have not been found.
2.2 Corpora and Methodology Used.
Bearing in mind that this essay aims to explore agreement of collective nouns in the two varieties of English ‘ British and American ‘ two corpora have been used to collect the data: the Frown Corpus, which represents American English, and the FLOB Corpus which represents British English. Both corpora belong to the collection of corpora known as ‘corpora of the Brown family’ (cf. Xiao 2008: 395).
The Brown Corpus, was built in the 1960s as the first in this family and it included texts of written American English published in 1961. As Xiao (ibid.) notes ‘[t]he target population was first grouped into 15 text categories, from which 500 samples of approximately 2,000 words were then drawn proportionally from each text category, totalling roughly one million words.’ This was the basic framework generally followed in compiling and organising other corpora of the Brown family. The British English counterpart of the Brown Corpus is the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus (abbreviated LOB). It also consists of 500 texts of 200 words each, classified into 15 text types, which gives one million words in all.
The newer, updated versions of the Brown and LOB corpora are the Freiburg-Brown Corpus of American English (Frown) and the Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English (FLOB), respectively. Compiling of both corpora began in 1991 and they were both released in 1999. Also, both of them followed the basic Brown scheme: 15 text types of 200 words each totalling one million words. When the Frown and FLOB corpora have been created, it was possible to carry out synchronic comparisons of British and American texts published in the 1990s.
In this essay, I will analyse collective nouns in both corpora and compare the results in terms of preference of collective nouns for singular or plural verbal (and pronominal) agreement. Also, I will point out some relevant syntactic and semantic features relating to the use of collective nouns on the basis of examples drawn from the two corpora.
Lastly, as far as collective nouns analysed in this study are concerned, I decided to include some of the collectives listed in Quirk et al. (1985: 316) and to supplement these with several collectives that can be found in Depraetere (2003: 110) and that are lacking in Quirk et al.’s grammar. The selection was made on the basis of the frequency of these nouns in the two corpora. A total of twenty nouns have been included. All of them can be said to denote collections of human beings, to a certain extent, which is the main reason why they are sometimes referred to as corporate nouns (Nixon 1972: 120).
2.3 Analysis of the Frown and FLOB Corpora.
The following table presents statistical results from the two corpora, after which certain syntactic and semantic similarities and disparities between collective nouns in the two corpora are discussed through the analysis of examples.
Table 1. Agreement with collective nouns in American and British English (Frown and FLOB).
Frown FLOB
Singular Plural Mixed Singular Plural Mixed
army 9 0 0 7 1 1
association 10 0 0 15 2 0
audience 9 3 0 13 6 0
board 10 1 0 10 2 0
class 10 0 0 9 0 0
club 9 1 0 9 1 0
college 8 0 0 12 0 0
committee 13 0 0 24 1 0
community 19 0 0 19 2 0
company 60 8 0 59 9 0
council 9 0 0 44 3 0
family 37 11 0 23 17 0
government 45 0 0 85 11 0
group 30 9 0 35 16 0
management 5 0 0 4 7 0
nation 16 0 0 8 1 0
parliament 2 0 0 9 0 0
party 18 0 0 27 6 0
staff 9 2 0 4 18 0
team 15 0 0 11 8 0
Army is always treated as singular, with no plural or mixed instances in the Frown Corpus. For example:
(4) The army was divided politically by rank, age, region, and ethnic group. (Frown, G72)
However, there are only two instances where the noun is directly followed by the finite verb in the singular form. In other instances, the collective is either immediately followed by a pronoun indicating singularity (e.g. its, itself) or substituted by the pronoun it (which is then followed by a particular verb) in the following clause. For example:
(5) In the Brezhnev era, in particular, official propaganda had glorified the mighty Soviet
army as the stalwart defender of socialism. By 1991 it was despised outside Russia as an
agent of imperial oppression’ (Frown, G72)
On the other hand, in the FLOB Corpus the majority of instances are singular, but there is also one instance indicating plural and one indicating mixed agreement. Also, pronominal agreement occurs less frequently in FLOB than in Frown, but when it occurs it can be found either within one sentence (as in (5) above) or it can run across sentence boundaries, as the example of mixed agreement in FLOB shows:
(6) In sharp contrast to its usual policy, since 25 October, the US Army is now refusing to
accept CO application until the soldier is actually in Saudi Arabia. How will they process
CO claims in the middle of the Saudi desert? (FLOB, F15)
The collective noun association also shows singular agreement in all instances in Frown, while in FLOB there are 15 instances of singular and 2 instances of plural agreement. Of course, when analysing the corpora it is necessary to bear in mind the difference between the two meanings of this noun: group vs. involvement, and to consider only the former. Also, some examples appear to be slightly problematic, as illustrated in:
(7) ‘ one of the more visible shareholder activist groups, United Shareholders Association,
Washington, D.C., tentatively added Citicorp and General Mills Inc. to the list of
companies it considers unfair to shareholders. (Frown, A35)
In (7), it might be unclear whether the pronoun it refers to the phrase one of the ‘ groups or to the noun Association, or even to both at the same time in the logical sense. It remains the fact that the phrase one of the ‘ groups conditions the singular form of the pronoun, but I nevertheless regarded the pronoun as referring to the collective noun as well, and included it in my results. In both corpora, both verbal and pronominal agreement can be found:
(8) The Association wouldn’t allow it. They said that allotments were only leased rather than
owned. (FLOB, K29)
In Frown, two-thirds of instances of audience show singular while one-third of instances show plural agreement. It is worth noting that in all three examples of this noun when it takes plural agreement, the common principle of individuality is involved (cf. Wong 2009: 8), i.e. each member of the audience is involved in or is experiencing something, as in:
(9) ‘ Piper hopes to transform her audience psychologically, by presenting them with an
immediate and unavoidable concrete reality’ (Frown, J59)
As far as audience in FLOB is concerned, there are slightly more instances of singular but also of plural agreement than in Frown. However, I would argue that that in some of these instances where audience is used in the plural, agreement is semantically conditioned. For example, in (10a, b) the noun phrase seats in itself indicates physical decomposition, i.e. each member of the audience normally occupies one seat. Therefore, the focus is on the individuals and it would be illogical to use the collective noun in the singular:
(10) a. Giovanni ‘s triumphalism in the face of ultimate disaster can hardly fail to thrill even in
the most leaden production, but Albery’s fine sense of theatre has the audience on the
edge of their seats. (FLOB, C12)
b. She could feel, rather than hear, the faint rustle of programmes as the audience took a
deep breath and craned forward in their seats for a better look at her’ (FLOB, P16)
Board strongly prefers singular agreement in American texts, and in British texts, board is also usually singular (10 instances), with two instances when it is treated as plural. One example from FLOB illustrates something that also happens more than once in the corpus, not only with this collective noun, and that is the difficulty to determine to what extent context influences the choice of agreement:
(11) This is not to say that the Hotspurs board should now sue the referee for their lost
millions’ (FLOB, B11)
When analysing sentences containing class, it is necessary to distinguish between the different meanings of the noun. In my analysis I only counted those instances referring to class as a group of students and as a social group of people. The results show that all examples both in Frown and FLOB are treated as singular. However, there are examples where class is followed by an of phrase including a noun in the plural (e.g. a class of adults) after which normally appears the pronoun who, which is also significant. The verb after such constructions is always in the plural and I believe that it does not refer to the subject noun phrase but only to the phrase within the subject (e.g. a class of adults who were’). This is why I excluded such instances from the results. In FLOB, all instances are treated as singular, but in a number of them the semantics of the verb strongly influences singular agreement, as in (12) where the structure be comprised of is closer to singularity than to plurality:
(12) ‘or an economic class which is comprised of both sexes. (FLOB, J28)
The collective club also predominantly shows singular concord in both corpora (the results are the same), with only one example per corpus where the noun is perceived as plural. In (13), the focus is clearly on the individual members of the club:
(13) The drinking club found this amusing; they made up sayings about the uses of bondage’
(Frown, R09)
College and Committee behave similarly, showing singular agreement in all instances in Frown (13 and 8 examples have been found, respectively). In FLOB, college is treated as singular in all 12 instances, while there is only one instance where committee is treated as plural, all others being singular. As far as committee is concerned, it usually appears as part of a more complex noun phrase, e.g. International Committee on English in the Liturgy (Frown, D16) and such phrases sometimes appear as acronyms (e.g. I.C.E.L.) in the text that follows. Therefore, it is also necessary to analyse these forms as collective nouns. In the corpus they always behave the same as the full forms, i.e. they also have singular agreement. Also, committee in FLOB is often followed by phrases such as be established, be set up, be made up etc. which I believe influences agreement to be singular, i.e. plural would be unexpected and even illogical in such examples.
The collective noun community is in Frown marked by intensional reference in all instances (cf. Allan 1979: 3), i.e. in all examples in the corpus the focus is on the group as a whole, resulting in singular agreement. In FLOB, the majority of instances are also singular but there are also two plural instances. However, there are also some unclear cases where it is not easy to determine to which noun the verb refers, as in (14) ‘ section or community:
(14) This affirmation is aimed not only at the non-polka’ but also at that’ section of the
Polish-American community which, until quite recently, has not wanted to acknowledge
the polka people’s existence at all. (Frown, F20)
Also, similarly to the two above analysed nouns college and committee, community is very rarely followed by a verb indicating singularity or plurality. Most often it has pronouns it and its as its coreferents in writing, as in:
(15) The Community’s longstanding commitment to the improvement of the situation of
women has established it as a pioneer and innovator in this field’ (Frown, J22)
Noun company is the second most frequent of collective nouns I analysed in the Frown and FLOB corpora, and it is treated as singular in nearly 90 percent of instances in both of them. However, there are several comments to be made on its different uses. One of the most frequent meanings this noun has is the one referring to industrial company. For example:
(16) Metal Improvement Company have been active for over 40 years in the standard aircraft
maintenance operation of controlled shot peening and shot blasting of aerospace
structures’ (FLOB, J80)
Another meaning refers to company as a group of friends or people commonly involved in something. As this meaning is concerned, both singular and plural examples can be found:
(17) a. The wonder – but one typical of the company – is that they have different and
distinctive personalities and qualities. (Frown, E24)
b. The ship’s company does not depend on the guts and skill of the commanding officer.
(Frown, K04).
However, there is a contextual reason for this variation in agreement. In (17a) company refers to artists performing in the opera and in the preceding sentence their individual names are listed, which conditions the focus to be on ‘the members of the collection’ (Svensson 1998: 138), i.e. the noun is perceived as plural. In contrast, in (17b) the collective probably refers to soldiers on the ship, and such groups of people are very often treated as singular because they have possibility to move but they very often lack volition, i.e. the people in the group cannot act individually as they wish (cf. Persson 1989: 179). Another case where the principle of unity vs. individuals is occurring can be seen in (18a, b) below, where the same company is being referred to in both sentences but the agreement is different:
(18) a. Hershey was targeted as a company that possibly supports food irradiation’
(Frown, H27)
b. The company then explained that when appropriate, they are looking to eliminate the
use of these chemicals through alternative methods. (Frown, H27)
The reason for the difference is influenced by the context: in (18a) the focus is on the company as an industrial unit, whereas in (18b) the focus is on the people probably working in the company’s management.
The collective noun family, also one of the most frequent collectives in American texts, shows singular agreement in 77 percent of examples (37 singular vs. 11 plural). On the other hand, this is much more balanced in FLOB where around 57 percent of instances show singular agreement while around 43 percent show plural agreement. In the majority of examples semantics plays a crucial role in determining either singular or plural agreement, but there are also some other factors that occasionally appear, as in:
(19) a. Mama put it this way: Family is family. (Frown, A33)
b. This widespread family of membrane protein receptors includes the receptors for the
mating pheromones in yeast’ (Frown, J11)
In (19a) the choice of singular verb is conditioned both grammatically but also the whole phrase itself appears to be an idiomatic expression. (19b) is one example of some sentences dealing with biology or chemistry, where the family is understood as a group of chemical elements or something similar and agreement is always singular. Furthermore, the principle of proximity does not influence agreement in such examples, i.e. the noun phrase in the plural does not affect the choice of the verb; instead, the whole subject noun phrase determines agreement.
As far as the noun group is concerned, almost 77 percent of instances show singular agreement in the Frown Corpus. However, in FLOB the ratio between singular and plural instances of agreement is slightly different: 68.5 singular to 31.5 plural. Some instances in both corpora are followed by a phrase containing a noun in the plural but agreement is sometimes singular and sometimes plural, as in:
(20) a. Currently a group of young women is surging forward in the company, bursting into
major roles. (Frown, E24)
b. In the hospital, a group of young people is silently weeping’ (Frown, L21)
c. The other major group of molluscs in the deep sea, the Scaphopoda, are far less well
known. (FLOB, J07)
Even though Depraetere (2003: 96) disregards instances in which collective nouns are preceded by the indefinite article, in the above examples we can see that there is a variation in agreement as far as some determiners are concerned. Also, the semantics of the verb in particular instances conditions type of agreement, i.e. collectives followed by certain verbs tend to be used in the singular:
(21) ‘the employed group includes all women who report any hours of paid employment.
(Frown, J27)
Collective noun nation shows only singular agreement in Frown, and in FLOB the majority of instances are also singular with only one in the plural. The same as with the noun group, when preceded by the quantifier no, nation is always perceived as singular, even though it is a matter of fact that this quantifier can be followed either by a singular or plural verb.
(22) No nation has ever done so. (Frown, B09)
Instances of party and team, referring primarily to political party and sports team respectively, show singular agreement in all instances in Frown. The situation is different in FLOB in that plural agreement also occurs, though still less frequently than singular agreement (agreement with party is in the plural in around 18 percent of instances, and in around 42 percent of instances of team). Also, in FLOB, party in instances of singular agreement most often refers to a political party, and team in instances of plural agreement very often refers to a football team. It is noticeable that grammatical agreement is very strong as far as these nouns are concerned, which is typical of collectives in American English, but some examples are interesting from the semantic point of view, e.g.:
(23) The Republican convention succeeded in the sense that the party clearly spoke its mind.
(Frown, B19)
Here, the verb in the plural might be expected given that the convention is normally a situation where opinions may differ, which means that the focus should be on the individuals, not on the party as a whole.
As far as staff is concerned, the difference is substantial between the two corpora. In Frown there is plural agreement in 18 percent of examples, whereas in FLOB plural agreement occurs in 82 percent of examples. This is one of the two cases in FLOB (and in both corpora) that a collective noun predominantly agrees with the verb or a pronoun in the plural.
Finally, four collective nouns to be discussed are council, government, management and parliament. In American texts, all four nouns are always treated as unities so agreement with them is always represented by the verb or pronoun in the singular.
(24) As the City Council prepares to vote next week on this plan, it should not be dissuaded by
any of the following myths. (Frown, B16)
In FLOB, on the other hand, parliament also has only singular agreement, but the other three nouns also show instances of plural agreement. In this corpus, agreement with council and government (the most frequent collective in FLOB) is plural in 6.4 and 11.5 percent of examples, respectively, and with management the majority of instances are plural (64 percent). These four nouns are discussed together because of syntactic and semantic features they share (Aremo 2005: 54). First of all, these collectives can be used with a determiner (e.g. the council) but also without any determiner:
(24) a. I know that Government is too big and spends too much. (Frown, H21)
b. There’s an implicit feeling that management’s still trying to screw you one way or the
other. (Frown, A18)
c. Parliament met the day after Suchinda went into hiding , and it quickly approved a
constitutional amendment requiring future Prime Ministers to be elected members of
the national legislature. (Frown, A33)
Almost in all instances when these collectives are not preceded by the determiner singular agreement normally occurs. However, I would disagree with Aremo’s (ibid.: 53) claim that it is not possible for a collective noun not preceded by the determiner to agree with the verb in the plural, because such instances can also be found in the corpus:
(25) Management are reminded that GLP studies must be identified as such before they are
initiated. (FLOB, H11)
Semantically, when used in this way, i.e. without any determiner, these nouns ‘have unique reference, i.e. they refer to a particular and uniquely identifiable government, a particular and uniquely identifiable parliament, etc., not to just any government, just any parliament, etc.’ (ibid.: 54).
3. Conclusion.
This essay has presented an analysis of the nature of collective nouns in written British and American texts. The discussion has first presented the theoretical background dealing with different classifications of collectives, followed by the section presenting the corpora and methodology used in the essay. Most importantly, the essay has presented statistical data and their comparison on the basis of the analysis of two corpora. Furthermore, the essay has also been focused on various semantic and syntactic properties of collectives and different factors that normally influence type of agreement with collective nouns, so some important conclusions can be drawn.
For the purpose of this essay more than 10,000 sentences have been analysed (4,851 in Frown; 5,218 in FLOB) containing forms that morphologically resembled collective nouns I searched for. Out of all these forms, 917 (378 in Frown; 539 in FLOB) turned out to be collective nouns. The number of collective nouns was surely much larger but only in these 917 instances it was possible to determine type of agreement on the basis of the form of the verb and pronoun with which the collective nouns agreed. Given that both corpora contained one million words each, one of the basic problems I faced was statistical relevance, i.e. the lack of sufficient examples of certain collective nouns. However, the frequency of different collective nouns varied a lot, so, for example, nation appeared only 9 times in FLOB, whereas the number of instances of government appeared to be sufficient for statistical analysis (96 times).
The main hypothesis in the essay was that singular agreement would turn out to be more frequent than plural agreement in both corpora and that plural agreement will occur more frequently in British than in American texts. After analysing the two corpora, I can conclude that both parts of the hypothesis have been confirmed. If we take a look at the table containing statistical results, we will notice that in both corpora singular agreement is the predominant one, while at the same time, plural agreement is more frequent in British texts. Mixed agreement occurred only once and since it has not been statistically relevant it has not been further discussed. Also, in contrast to Frown, results from FLOB show that two collectives show more instances of plural than of singular agreement. Management is treated as plural in the majority of examples, while the large majority of instances of staff show plural agreement. Besides verbal agreement, pronominal agreement also appears to be very frequent. It is not only limited to one sentence but runs across sentence boundaries in many instances. It is also possible to conclude that various factors very often influence type of agreement, among which one of the most frequent ones is the semantics of the verb or simply the very context in which a particular collective occurs. Despite the fact that larger corpora would be more suitable for statistical analyses of this kind, the data that have been obtained from the two corpora have appeared to be relevant enough to draw the aforementioned conclusions.