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ARTICLE 6, METHODOLOGY - Coggle Diagram
ARTICLE 6
MAIN FINDING
Comparison of the news genre with the BESC, F-LOB and Frown
The total results of the SWENC and the BESC (TABLE 3)
Agreement was found with 12 out of the 41 collective nouns that this thesis has looked into.
BESC shows 100% singular verbal agreement whereas the SWENC shows 92%. The BESC however shows some variation in pronominal number, but this variation is greater in the SWENC.
The total results of agreement in the six copora (FIGURE 5)
Swedish journalists writing in English seem not to follow BrE or AmE at all. The results also indicate that in AmE there is only 1% in difference of verbal number between the news genre and the other genres of writing
Frown shows more instances of plural pronouns than the press subcorpora, which indicates that there is a difference in pronominal number based on written genre in AmE
Swedish journalists are more flexible in constructing pronominal agreement than British and American journalists.
There are regional differences as well as stylistic differences in written genres. This consequently suggests a future corpus study of different genres of written English by Swedes
Discussion of the findings with previous findings
Swedish journalists construct agreement with collective nouns based on Swedish usage.
singular pronouns are more common than plural pronouns
Swedish journalists seem to prefer singular verbal agreement with collective nouns in English, but they are more flexible when it comes to pronominal agreement.
plural forms seem to be more frequent in spoken English
Findings in the SWENC, F-LOB Press and Frown Press
25 out of 41 collective nouns were found with agreement (TABLE 2)
92% of the tokens took singular verbs and 61% of the tokens took singular pronouns
Variation in agreement was thus found to occur more frequently in the
pronominal category
Total result for verbal and pronominal concord with collective nouns in the SWENC and the press subcorpora of F-LOB and Frown (FIGURE 1)
The SWENC has 92% singular verbal agreement whereas F-LOB Press has 90% and Frown Press 96%. For pronominal agreement, the results show more variation
The SWENC has more instances of plural pronominal agreement than the press sections in both F-LOB and Frown.
Plural pronouns common than plural verbs in all three corpora
singular verbal agreement is the preferred number of agreement within the news genre as observed in the SWENC and the press subcorpora of F-LOB and Frown.
The results for singular verbal agreement with the most frequent collective nouns in the SWENC, F-LOB Press and Frown Press (FIGURE 2)
The most frequent collective nouns in the SWENC are government, committee, board, company, party, office, organisation (organization), commission and names of organisations
singular verbal agreement is the preferred number of agreement for the most frequent collective nouns as well. Both the SWENC and F-LOB Press however show some variation in verbal number whereas Frown Press show 100% singular verbal concord for all the collective nouns
MATERIAL
Written English
by Swedes
A selection of newspapers and a corporate newsletter written in English by Swedes named the Swedish English Newspaper Corpus(SWENC)
the Swedish Wire
The Local
English section of Svenskt näringsliv
Stockholm
List of collective nouns.
Couple
Government
Minority
Society
Assembly
Committee
Crew
Group
Office
Staff
Association
Audience
Board
Community
Company
Congress
Crowd
Department
Family
Jury
Navy
Majority
Organisation(2)
Parliament
Party
Team
The press
The public
Class
Corporation
Faculty
Management
Population
The state
Club
Council
Gang
Military
Senate
AIM
• Examines if there is variation in usage and if Swedish journalists are consistent when choosing number verbs and pronouns with collective nouns
• Find out whether concord with collective nouns is based on various linguistic factors as explored in Levin (2001) or on grammatical concord, i.e. singular pronouns and verbs
• Explore the choice of concord with collective nouns
METHODOLOGY
. Use the corpus software AntConc
find concordance hits with collective nouns
The instances that have been included
singular or plural verb
singular or plural verb following relative pronouns
singular or plural pronouns
Use the corpus as a tool
find out whether English in Sweden follows American English or the British English variety
investigate whether the singular verb and pronoun pattern is more frequent than the plural one when it comes to collective nouns
Compare the findings
SWENC with the findings in the press sections A, B and C of Frown (Freiburg-Brown corpus of American English) and F-LOB (Freiburg-LOB corpus of British English) from 1990s
summarize
discuss findings