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:star:Collective nouns in English used in Sweden :star: - Coggle Diagram
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Collective nouns in English used in Sweden
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:pencil2:Collective nouns and concord :pencil2:
Variation in number concord with collective nouns
most collective nouns take singular concord and itself affects the number concord
collective nouns are used with both singular and plural concord
variation in agreement with collective nouns in English
According to"Biber"
udience, board, committee, government, jury and public => singular concord
staff => plural concord => most of the time
family, crew => both singular and plural concord
Proper nouns that constitute collective nouns
It is observed that plural agreement is often found with proper nouns that behave as collective nouns and with the names of organizations and companies as well as sports teams
There is, however, a difference between BrE and AmE when it comes to agreement with sports teams . Sports teams usually occur with plural concord in BrE whereas AmE prefers singular verbs and singular personal pronouns to go with sports teams
If the names of sports teams have a plural form, they often take plural agreement even in AmE. Singular verbal agreement is also preferred in AmE with national teams, but plural personal pronouns may occur
However, not all proper nouns can be collective nouns and the process of proper nouns becoming collective nouns is called metonymy.
Factors which affect agreement
singular agreement - formal written language
number agreement - spoken English
semantic factors - certain verbs used with collective nouns
semantic cohesion - determined by its function.
Previous studies on agreement with collective nouns
agreement within the phrase is most canonical
the shorter the structural distance between the collective noun
and the targets => the more likely a canonical agreement to occur
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Materials and methods
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Materials
examples of written English by Swedes.newspapers and a
corporate newsletter written in English by SwedesSwedish
English Newspaper Corpus (SWENC).
Methods
an empirical study of
English usage in Sweden.
Using the corpus as a tool, AntConc
to find out whether English in Sweden follows American English or the British English variety.
Conclusion
The tables for all agreement findings in he SWENC, F-LOB Press, Frown Press, the BESC, F-LOB and Frown can be found in
FInding in Tables
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Findings
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Table 2
92% of the tokens took singular verbs
61% of the tokens took singular pronouns.
Figure 1
singular verbal agreement is the preferred number of agreement within the news genre
SWENC has 92% singular verbal agreement whereas F-LOB Press has 90% and Frown Press 96%.
Figure 2 & 3
more variation in pronominal number than verbal
number for the SWENC and F-LOB Press.
more instances of plural pronominal agreement for the most frequent collective nouns in the SWENC than for the press sections inF-LOB and Frown.
Figure 4
singular verbal agreement is the preferred
number concord for names of organisations
the preferences of spoken language, agreement with pronominal number
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Conclusion
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Aim: investigate how Swedes construct number concord with collective nouns in English within the news genre.
searching for concordances of collective nouns in three primary corpora and three secondary corpora:
Singular concord seems to be more frequent with collective nouns in Sweden.
prefer to use plural pronouns rather than plural verbs with collective nouns, i.e.