Abstract
The basic purpose of this study is to describe agreement with collective nouns in American, British, Australian and New Zealand English by comparing singular and plural agreement with verbs and relative pronouns in the four varieties. The varieties of English to be studied in this thesis belong to the inner-circle , i.e. English as used by the native speakers of it in the UK, the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Canadian English has been excluded. The focus of the study is on the regional variation between these varieties, the chronological development in British and American English and the different between speech and writing in British English.
This thesis is a corpus-based. Corpus is the Latin word for body and any collection of more than one text may be called a corpus. Seven kinds of corpora from different varieties were used in this investigative study: FROWN/ BROWN (The Freiburg - / Brown Corpus of American English, FLOB/ LOB (The Freiburg - / Lancaster-Oslo/ Bergen Corpus of British English), ACE (The Australian Corpus of English), WC (The Wellington Corpus of Written New Zealand English) and the BNC (The British National Corpus). Except the BNC which compromises both spoken and written material, the other corpora are corpora for written language.
The traditional description of variation between singular and plural verb agreement with collective nouns is that: singular verbs are used when the group as collective or unit is in focus, and plural verbs are used when the people constituting the collective are thought of individually. Some factors work together to shape the form of the verb such as semantic, syntactic, regional, dialectical, animacy, written vs. spoken language, genre and time influence. These factors and their influence on the choice between singular or plural verb were taken in consideration during the investigation.
The study is an attempt to answer whether it is true that American English generally prefer singular verb agreement and British English take both singular and plural agreement with preference of singularity and Australian English and New Zealand English are in-between American and British English. Another thing to be verified is the general view about variation between spoken and written language, which say that: plural agreement is accessible more frequently in speech than in writing. Another challenge of this study is that to point out how agreement of collective nouns has changed throughout time and whether the change is from singular to plural or vice versa. Some shifts in agreement also were dealt with in this study. The results of this study were illustrated by tables and diagrams to show these differences clearly.