Agreement with collective nouns: diachronic corpus studies of American and British English

English collective nouns and their agreement patterns have been extensively studied in corpus linguistics. Previous research has highlighted variability within and across English varieties (e.g., Levin 2001; Depraetere 2003;Hundt 2006). This thesis complements earlier research by examining diachroni...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Lakaw, Alexander (Author)
Format: Thesis Book
Language:English
Published: Växjö Linnaeus University Press 2024
Series:Linnaeus University Dissertations No 534
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Summary:English collective nouns and their agreement patterns have been extensively studied in corpus linguistics. Previous research has highlighted variability within and across English varieties (e.g., Levin 2001; Depraetere 2003;Hundt 2006). This thesis complements earlier research by examining diachronic agreement patterns of 20 collective nouns in American (AmE)and British English (BrE). This study employs classic corpus linguistics methods, analysing data from 1810–1909. It covers collective nouns from six semantic domains: EMPLOYEES (e.g., crew), FAMILY (e.g., couple), MILITARY (e.g.,army), POLITICS (e.g., government), PUBLIC ORDER (e.g., police), and SOCIETY (e.g., generation). The corpora used are the Corpus of HistoricalAmerican English (COHA) for AmE, and the Old Bailey Corpus (OBC) and the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (CLMET) for the BrE variety.
Almost 10,000 tokens of agreement with collective nouns were analysed, making this the most extensive diachronic study on this topic to-date. The results challenge the assumption that the shift towards more frequent singular agreement with collective nouns is an "American-led" process (Collins 2015: 29, see also Bauer 1994: 61–66). The evidence gathered in this thesis suggests that AmE was lagging behind BrE in the development towards a higher frequency of singular agreement with collective nouns during the 19th century, indicating a "colonial lag" (cf. Marckwardt 1958:77; Hundt 2009a: 27–28). However, a further investigation reveals that AmE, in the early 20th century, rapidly overtakes BrE in the development towards singular agreement, a process which can be interpreted as a socalled ‘kick-down’ development as defined by Hundt (2009a: 33).
The study finds differences in agreement preferences among specific nouns, leading to the exclusion of the PUBLIC ORDER category, i.e., the nouns watch, patrol, and police from the investigation, as these seemingly never were conceptualised as collectives by English-speaking
Physical Description:iv, 304 Seiten Diagramme
ISBN:9789180821827

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