Agreement with collective nouns: Diachronic corpus studies of American and British English
Authors:   , Lakaw Alexander 
Published: September 2024

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 communities in Britain or in North America. Furthermore, differences are also detected between the different semantic categories within the two varieties investigated. For example, POLITICS and SOCIETY nouns show a strong singular preference in AmE but are variable in BrE. EMPLOYEE nouns gradually shifted towards singular agreement in both varieties, except for staff, which appears to lean towards a preference for plural agreement inBrE. Additionally, certain semantic categories exhibit similar agreement patterns in both AmE and BrE, FAMILY nouns with variable agreement, and MILITARY nouns with a pronounced preference for the singular. In search for underlying reasons behind the development of agreement with collective nouns, this study applies a variety of different methods to investigate certain factors. Monofactorial analyses of verb type and the distance between verbs and pronouns to the collective do not significantly indicate an impact on agreement patterns. A complementary logistic regression confirmed the preference for singular verbal agreement over the plural in the investigated data as well as a higher likelihood for the plural in pronominal agreement. Other factors showed no significant influence. Lastly, prescriptivism was identified as a factor that influenced the significant shift towards singular agreement in early-20th century AmE. Ananalysis of American publications offering advice on agreement found a correlation between stricter rules on singular agreement as well as teaching recommendations and agreement patterns in AmE. This suggests that modern English variation in collective noun agreement resulted from a conscious change, driven by language ideology and nationalism, to distinguish AmE from BrE through singular agreement preference.