In this study, I investigate the patterns of verbal agreement of twenty-three singular collective nouns in English which take plural of-dependents (e.g., a group of children or a bunch of people). The main aim is to explore the extent to which this constituent may influence the number of the main verb, by considering factors such as the role of overt morphological markers for number in the oblique noun and the influence of syntactic distance on the patterns of verbal agreement. The data will show strong conditioning effects of the plural of-dependent on the verb, in triggering plural verbal number, for example. Contrary to what has been claimed hitherto, syntactic distance does not result in an increase of semantic (i.e., plural) agreement in this type of construction. In fact, the non-overtly marked plural noun people, whose influence on verbal agreement is strong in local syntactic domains, shows a considerable decrease in the proportion of plural verbal forms which it takes with increasing distance, contrary to overtly marked plural nouns. Finally, in light of the grammaticalisation suffered by homologous constructions such as a lot of, I will also consider the role of verbal agreement in the possible idiomatisation of the structures that I scrutinise here.
This volume provides an unprecedented, comprehensive account of and consistent gradient of construal for the various means of expressing lexical-level (bunch, clothes) and discourse-built (ever y car) semantic plurality in English, with a focus on the delimitation of the category of 'collective nouns.' Moving away from the traditional reliance on the variable agreement patterns of collective nouns to focus on their construal of the plurality, Gardelle's study proposes not only a consistent characterisation of this class of semantically plural nouns as wholes of highly integrated units but also accommodates, by comparison, looser ways of integrating units in a plurality such as 'aggregates' (furniture, these crew), which denote classes and whose starting point of the construal is the plurality, and 'groupings' (sheep, lots of students), where the units are more highly individuated, among others.
There is a wealth of studies on L2 English acquisition in CLIL contexts in Spain, but most have underexplored the potential impact of CLIL in the longer run on the morphosyntax of earlier starters from monolingual regions. This paper fills this gap by exploring agreement morphology errors and subject omission in the oral production of Primary Education English learners from the Spanish monolingual community of Cantabria. The sample investigated consists of the individual narration of a story by learners in two age-matched (11-12 year-olds) groups, one CLIL (n=28) and one non- CLIL (n=35). The results show no statistically significant differences between both groups for the provision of specific linguistic features at a younger age, though some evidence also points to a subtle effect of additional CLIL exposure. Both groups show moderately low rates of null subjects; they omit affixal morphology (*he eat ) significantly more frequently than suppletive inflection (*he _ eating) and they seldom produce commission errors (*they eats). Interestingly, non-CLIL learners show far greater rates of omission with auxiliary be than copula be and frequently use the placeholder is (*he is eat), which evinces an earlier stage of acquisition than that of CLIL learners.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.