Abstract:This article presents an analysis of synchronic variation and diachronic change in verbal agreement with the French noun foule. This noun, like many collective nouns in French and other languages, can show variation between singular and plural verbal agreement (la foule des habitants exulte SING de joie dans les rues vs. une foule de gens pressés s'attardent PLU ). A novel combination of data, including data from sociolinguistic interviews, a gap-fill exercise, and a corpus of written French, is used to invest… Show more
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