The Rest of the Family Is or Are? : A quantitative analysis of collective nouns that are pre-modified by quantifying noun expressions in British and American English

Abstract: Collective nouns are a category of nouns that refer to a group of people or things. This group of nouns has the special characteristic that when in singular form, they can be followed by either a singular or a plural verb. This feature of collective nouns has attracted a great deal of attention from researchers and traditional grammarians, who in the last few decades have tried to explain this phenomenon by investigating different perspectives on it, thereby taking into consideration morphological, syntactic and semantic, as well as variational and discourse-specific differences (Biber et al, 1999; Levin, 2001; Depraetere, 2003). One of the main assumptions that has been suggested in the literature is that collective nouns have specific concord preferences, allowing for either a singular or a plural verb or both. Another assumption that has also been invoked is that when collective nouns are part of a complex noun phrase, as for instance in the phrase the rest of (the) society, in which the collective is part of the of-phrase, the plural tends to be used. Based on these two assumptions, the aim of this thesis is to further investigate, firstly whether a singular or a plural verb is used after expressions where a collective noun is being modified by a quantifying noun expression (e.g. the rest of, part of), secondly whether the concord preferences the collective nouns have an influence on the verbal concord and finally if there is any difference between the two main varieties of English, namely British and American English. Since this is a topic of actual language use, the methods used in corpus linguistic research are also employed in the thesis. More specifically, by looking at the instances of quantifying noun expressions modifying collective nouns as well as the frequency with which such constructions occur in two different corpora, the enTenTen13 and the GloWbE (Corpus of Global Web-Based English), the thesis seeks to answer the aforementioned questions. From the analysis of the data it was concluded that in some cases the concord preferences of the collective nouns influenced the verb form following the complex noun phrases, whereas in others these preferences did not determine the selection of the verb form. Syntactic, semantic as well as contextual factors seem to also influence the selection of the verb form. Furthermore, variational differences occurred, since in British English the plural was more often used with collective nouns that prefer the plural concord over the singular one or that are more variable in their concord patterns, whereas in American English the singular was the preferred choice in all cases.