Subject-Verb Agreement: A Corpus-Based Study of the Collective Nouns Majority and Minority
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This paper investigates variations of subject-verb agreement of the collective nouns majority and minority, representing semantically quite different amounts whereas grammatically they are in singular form. The Corpus data of Contemporary American English (COCA) were used. It was found that overall the collective nouns, both majority and minority, take a plural verb rather than a singular verb. However, majority and minority take slightly different number verb agreements: minority tends to agree with singular verbs (39%) compared to majority (19%). The presence of local nouns increased the chance of plural verb agreement in both majority and minority, whereas the non-presence of local nouns increases the chance of singular verb agreement in both majority and minority. Thus, the semantic meaning of minority, relatively a small amount, compared to majority (most), plays a role in choosing a verb even though majority and minority are grammatically singular forms of collective nouns.
Abstract
This paper investigates variations of subject-verb agreement of the collective nouns majority and minority, representing semantically quite different amounts whereas grammatically they are in singular form. The Corpus data of Contemporary American English (COCA) were used. It was found that overall the collective nouns, both majority and minority, take a plural verb rather than a singular verb. However, majority and minority take slightly different number verb agreements: minority tends to agree with singular verbs (39%) compared to majority (19%). The presence of local nouns increased the chance of plural verb agreement in both majority and minority, whereas the non-presence of local nouns increases the chance of singular verb agreement in both majority and minority. Thus, the semantic meaning of minority, relatively a small amount, compared to majority (most), plays a role in choosing a verb even though majority and minority are grammatically singular forms of collective nouns.
참고문헌 (11)
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