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2102615 results in Journals

Page 595 of 105131

  • Number Agreement in British and American English: Disagreeing to Agree Collectively

  • Kathryn Bock, Sally Butterfield, Anne Cutler, J. Cooper Cutting, Kathleen M. Eberhard, Karin R. Humphreys
  • Journal:
    Language / Volume 82 / Issue 1 / March 2006
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    19 February 2026, pp. 64-113

  • British and American speakers exhibit different verb number agreement patterns when sentence subjects have collective head nouns. From linguistic and psycholinguistic accounts of how agreement is implemented, three alternative hypotheses can be derived to explain these differences. The hypotheses involve variations in the representation of notional number, disparities in how notional and grammatical number are used, and inequalities in the grammatical number specifications of collective nouns. We carried out a series of corpus analyses, production experiments, and norming studies to test these hypotheses. The results converge to suggest that British and American speakers are equally sensitive to variations in notional number and implement subject-verb agreement in much the same way, but are likely to differ in the lexical specifications of number for collectives. The findings support a psycholinguistic theory that explains verb and pronoun agreement within a parallel architecture of lexical and syntactic formulation.

Page 595 of 105131