Collective nouns and language change

Abstract

This study concerns the changing and variable agreement patterns with twenty-one lowfrequency collective nouns (e.g. trio) in British English. The data come from the 1990 and 2000 CD-ROM editions of The Independent. The token frequencies of nouns do not appear to affect the preference for singular verb agreement. There are, however, clear differences between noun types, as is typical for lexical diffusion. Most nouns have developed a strong preference for singular verb agreement, some remain variable, and some prefer the plural. Many of the agreement patterns for individual nouns can be motivated with reference to the characteristics of the nouns rather than to the semantics of the verbs. This investigation found no evidence that singular verb agreement, which is argued in this study to be the unmarked alternative, is generally on the increase. Rather it seems that nouns which prefer plural verbs continue to move towards plural agreement.

Yolanda Fernández-Pena, Reconciling synchrony, diachrony and usage in verb number agreement with complex collective subjects. New York and London: Routledge, 2020. Pp xv + 226. ISBN 9780367417154.

“…object and person ) form the category that increases its likelihood of plural agreement the most with higher complexity. Regular plural oblique nouns are instead less likely to pattern with increasing distance in words, a finding not conforming to Corbett's (1979) Agreement Hierarchy or previous results for prototypical collectives (Levin 2001). Moreover, increased complexity as reflected in a large number of postmodifiers leads to lower proportions of plural agreement with the unmarked plural people as the oblique noun.…”

“…Thus, the findings corroborate some previous findings suggesting that syntactic distance (i.e. syntactic boundaries) exerts stronger influence on agreement than distance in words (Levin 2001: 102).…”

Frequency patterns of semantic change: corpus-based evidence of a near-critical dynamics in language change

“…Nevertheless, several arguments argue against this interpretation. First, the semantic evolution involves very long timescales, up to several centuries [ 41 ]; second, societal diffusion, of a new technological device, for instance, is associated with a specific scaling law between the steep and duration of the S-curve of [ 43 ], which is very different from the behaviour of the forms in our dataset, where no scaling law is to be found (the two parameters are related by a trivial −1.0 exponent; see electronic supplementary material, SID).…”

“…As acknowledged by a few authors [35,36], it is interesting to note that, in the literature, the S-growth is given two very different interpretations. According to the first one, an S-curve describes the spread of the novelty in a community of speakers [4,[37][38][39], as for the second one, it reflects the spread in language itself, the new variant being used in an increasing number of contexts [17,[40][41][42]. According to the interpretation we give to our model, the diffusion chiefly happens over the linguistic memory of the whole speech community.…”

7. The agreement of collective nouns in the history of Ancient Greek and German

“…This choice was necessary for two reasons: First and foremost, not all lexemes have been used continuously from the oldest sources to the present day (cf. The second reason for considering more than one collective noun was that we wanted to investigate whether some controllers trigger more plural agreement than others: Levin (2001Levin ( , 2006 has shown this for English collective nouns, although the range of meanings there is considerably larger than in our study. folc is relatively rare in Old High German, liût being preferred, especially by Otfrid and Notker.…”