On verbal concord with collective nouns in British English I am very grateful to Susan Reed for generously discussing the collectives issue and commenting on the text. I owe deepest thanks to Tine de Cat, for helping me with the statistical interpretation of the data. I would also like to thank the two anonymous referees, for their critical observations and suggestions for improvement. One of the referees guided me to Levins doctoral dissertation (2001), Agreement with collective nouns in English, of whose existence I was unaware while writing my article. Ample references have been included to this impressive study in the revised version of the text. I am grateful to Chad Langford and Frank Joosten for casting a critical eye on the revised version of the article.

2003 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
ILSE DEPRAETERE
Keyword(s):  
Doctoral Dissertation ◽  
Statistical Interpretation ◽  
British English ◽  
Collective Nouns ◽  
English I

scholarly journals Compromiser - a notional paradigm

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (13) ◽  
pp. 157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carita Paradis
Keyword(s):  
Moderate Degree ◽  
Intensity Scale ◽  
British English ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Degree Modifiers ◽  
English I

On the basis of an investigation of the lexical forms quite, rather, fairly, and pretty in contemporary spoken British English, I postulate that these lexical items form a notional paradigm of compromiser within the category of degree modifiers. Compromisers are cognitive synonyms that occupy the middle of an abstract intensity scale, approximating a mean degree of another word, eg quite / rather / fairly / pretty dirty. They are all polysemous and poly-functional words, whose meanings are determined by a crucial semantic trait ‘to a moderate degree’ on the paradigmatic axis, and by a semantic-syntactic, selection-licensing mechanism on the syntagmatic axis.

scholarly journals The syntax of semantic agreement in English

2017 ◽  
Vol 53 (04) ◽  
pp. 823-863 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER W. SMITH
Keyword(s):  
British English ◽  
Collective Nouns ◽  
Semantic Agreement

This paper investigates the properties of plural agreement that is triggered by collective nouns in British English. Both singular and plural agreement are able to appear with these collective nouns, which are shown to be morphologically singular but semantically plural. Plural agreement, however, is systematically more restricted than singular agreement, appearing in a subset of the environments where singular agreement is allowed. Restrictions on plural come from the nature of agreement; semantic agreement features can only enter into agreement when the controller of agreement c-commands the target of agreement, whereas morphologically motivated agreement is not subject to the same structural restriction. This asymmetry between the two types of agreement is shown to arise from the proposal that Agree (Chomsky 2000, 2001) is distributed over the syntactic and post-syntactic components (Arregi & Nevins 2012).

scholarly journals Concord patterns with collective nouns in Hong Kong English. With illustrative material from the International Corpus of English (Hong Kong component)

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
May Lai-Yin Wong
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
British English ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Hong Kong English ◽  
Illustrative Material ◽  
Collective Nouns

This corpus-based study reports on both a quantitative and qualitative account of the use of collective nouns in Hong Kong English, with particular reference to subject-verb agreement/concord patterns. Singular concord was found to be the preferred pattern among thirty-five collective nouns under interrogation in the ICE-HK corpus. It is argued that the preference for singular concord serves as a signal that Hong Kong English might be less conservative than British English in converging towards the norm of using singular concord with collective nouns across the globe.

scholarly journals English in the 2010s – Getting up Close and Personal

2011 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 343
Author(s):  
John Jamieson
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
First Person ◽  
English Speaker ◽  
British English ◽  
The World ◽  
Polynesian Languages ◽  
The Way ◽  
English I

The following is a personal enquiry into how our view of the world may be affected in some very specific ways by the language we speak, and more particularly the way we write, with specific reference to consensus and norms. These musings have arisen over many years of working as a translator, and are based on my interactions as an English speaker with texts in many European, and to a lesser extent, Polynesian languages. The English I speak of here is mainly my English, perhaps my idiolect as a 58-year-old New Zealander. Some of the preferences I mention may be less applicable in British English, for example, but every native speaker's idiolect reflects something of the language as a whole, and I hope my readers will identify linguistically with some of what I am saying. I hope I may be forgiven for writing rather colloquially and in the first person. This choice is entirely consistent with my subject-matter, however, as will become evident.

Collective nouns and language change

2006 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
MAGNUS LEVIN
Keyword(s):  
Language Change ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Strong Preference ◽  
British English ◽  
Cd Rom ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Lexical Diffusion ◽  
Collective Nouns

This study concerns the changing and variable agreement patterns with twenty-one low-frequency 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.

scholarly journals The Effect of L2 Experience on the Perceptual Assimilation of British English Monophthongs to Thai Monophthongs by L2 Thai Learners

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Patchanok Kitikanan
Keyword(s):  
Perceived Similarity ◽  
British English ◽  
Learning Research ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Sound Learning ◽  
Speech Learning ◽  
Phonological System ◽  
English I

Perceptual assimilation is a well-known task; however, there is no study on the assimilation pattern of the English monophthongs by L2 Thai learners. The aims of this study are to explore the perceptual assimilation patterns of the British English monophthongs to Thai monophthongs by L2 Thai learners and to examine the effect of L2 experience on this perception. The target British English sounds were /iː, ɪ, e, æ, ɒ, ɑː, ɔː, ʊ, uː, ʌ, ɜː/ in /bVt/ context. The Thai listeners performed an assimilation task by matching these British English monophthongs with their L1 Thai monophthongs. The results showed no difference in the assimilation patterns between the high-experienced and low-experienced groups in the perception of the English /ɪ, e, ɑː, ɔː, ʊ, ʌ, ɜː/. The degree of the perceived similarity in the matching of these vowels to the Thai sound categories between these two groups was not significantly different from one another either. However, English /e/ was mostly perceived as Thai /e/ in the high-experienced group to a greater degree than the low-experienced group. The findings also showed the difference in the assimilation patterns between these two groups, i.e. for English /æ, iː, uː, ɒ/ suggesting the importance of the L2 experience in the exploration of the L2 speech learning research. The implication for L2 sound learning of this study is that having higher number of phonemes in the L1 phonological system than that in the L2 one is less important than the L2 experience. 

Utility of the doctoral dissertation.

1975 ◽  
Vol 30 (11) ◽  
pp. 1054-1061 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan L. Porter ◽  
Dael Wolfle
Keyword(s):  
Doctoral Dissertation
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