*
Winner of
AEDEAN Leocadio Martín Mingorance Book Award on Theoretical and Applied English Linguistics
(2021)*
*Winner of ESLA Guadalupe Aguado Research Award for Young Researchers
(2022)*
*Winner of ESSE Book Award 2022 for Young Researchers in the category 'English Language and Linguistics*
This book uses corpus-based methodologies to investigate the wide variety of factors behind verb number agreement with complex collective noun phrases in English.
The literature on collective nouns and their agreement patterns spans an array of disciplines and approaches. However, little of the research conducted to date has focused on the influence of
of
-dependents on verb number with relational collective nouns, as in examples such as
a bunch of
or
a group of
. Drawing on data from two case studies – one based on the
Corpus of Historical American English
(COHA), and the other on the
British National Corpus
(BNC) and the
Corpus of Contemporary American English
(COCA) – Fernández-Pena uses statistical modelling to unpack the different morphological, syntactic, semantic and lexical dimensions of the variables affecting verb number agreement with complex collective noun phrases in English. This multidimensional analysis of the significance of
-dependents in the patterning and contemporary usage of collective nouns offers new insight into and understanding of both synchronic variation and diachronic change.
This book is an essential read for scholars of English language variation and change, historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, and usage-based approaches to the study of language.