Plural verbal agreement with sports teams (“Liverpool have beaten Manchester United 4-0 tonight”) is a distinct feature of British English. Prior corpus-based studies show that plural verbal agreement tends to be more frequent with collective nouns in sport texts than in other news (Hundt 1998; Levin 2001). However, beyond these genre-level differences, there are significant gaps in our understanding, particularly regarding sociolinguistic and individual-level variation in this grammatical domain.

This presentation investigates the verbal agreement patterns of individuals who use English as a second language (L2) in public settings. Our study focuses on foreign-born football managers working in England, specifically in the English Premier League, which has attracted managers from various European countries since the late 1990s. These managers, who are public figures and native speakers of languages other than English, conduct pre- and post-game press conferences in English as part of their managerial duties. The individual informants were chosen because the agreement patterns in their native languages favor singular verbal agreement.

We are interested in whether our these L2 speakers of English use singular or plural verbal agreement when talking about their own teams and their opponents. Additionally, we aim to determine if these agreement forms remain stable or change during their careers in England.

To explore this phenomenon, we utilize an underused source for accessing individual variation: a large set of interviews and press conferences available online. We use automatically-generated transcripts from YouTube recordings, with data obtained through national digital humanities infrastructure projects in Finland and in Sweden. This dataset includes recordings of managers’ interviews and press conferences spanning roughly a decade from the mid-2010s onwards.

The topic is of interest to various audiences, not limited to those studying agreement patterns. Our unique data collection also appeals to people interested in digital humanities. The corpus-based observations not only shed light on verbal agreement patterns in proper noun + verb structures but also contribute to debates on how idiolects change in the short-term post-adolescence (Sankoff 2018). The results could provide insights into how non-native adult speakers handle stable lexico-grammatical changes in society. Prior studies have identified three trajectories of individual change: stability, adoption, and swimming against the community current.

English collective nouns and their agreement patterns have been extensively studied in corpus linguistics. Previous research has highlighted variability within and across English varieties (e.g., Levin 2001; Depraetere 2003;Hundt 2006). This thesis complements earlier research by examining diachronic agreement patterns of 20 collective nouns in American (AmE)and British English (BrE). This study employs classic corpus linguistics methods, analysing data from 1810–1909. It covers collective nouns from six semantic domains: EMPLOYEES (e.g., crew), FAMILY (e.g., couple), MILITARY (e.g.,army), POLITICS (e.g., government), PUBLIC ORDER (e.g., police), and SOCIETY (e.g., generation). The corpora used are the Corpus of HistoricalAmerican English (COHA) for AmE, and the Old Bailey Corpus (OBC) and the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (CLMET) for the BrE variety. Almost 10,000 tokens of agreement with collective nouns were analysed, making this the most extensive diachronic study on this topic to-date. The results challenge the assumption that the shift towards more frequent singular agreement with collective nouns is an “American-led” process (Collins 2015: 29, see also Bauer 1994: 61–66). The evidence gathered in this thesis suggests that AmE was lagging behind BrE in the development towards a higher frequency of singular agreement with collective nouns during the 19th century, indicating a “colonial lag” (cf. Marckwardt 1958:77; Hundt 2009a: 27–28). However, a further investigation reveals that AmE, in the early 20th century, rapidly overtakes BrE in the development towards singular agreement, a process which can be interpreted as a socalled ‘kick-down’ development as defined by Hundt (2009a: 33). The study finds differences in agreement preferences among specific nouns, leading to the exclusion of the PUBLIC ORDER category, i.e., the nouns watch, patrol, and police from the investigation, as these seemingly never were conceptualised as collectives by English-speaking communities in Britain or in North America. Furthermore, differences are also detected between the different semantic categories within the two varieties investigated. For example, POLITICS and SOCIETY nouns show a strong singular preference in AmE but are variable in BrE. EMPLOYEE nouns gradually shifted towards singular agreement in both varieties, except for staff, which appears to lean towards a preference for plural agreement inBrE. Additionally, certain semantic categories exhibit similar agreement patterns in both AmE and BrE, FAMILY nouns with variable agreement, and MILITARY nouns with a pronounced preference for the singular. In search for underlying reasons behind the development of agreement with collective nouns, this study applies a variety of different methods to investigate certain factors. Monofactorial analyses of verb type and the distance between verbs and pronouns to the collective do not significantly indicate an impact on agreement patterns. A complementary logistic regression confirmed the preference for singular verbal agreement over the plural in the investigated data as well as a higher likelihood for the plural in pronominal agreement. Other factors showed no significant influence. Lastly, prescriptivism was identified as a factor that influenced the significant shift towards singular agreement in early-20th century AmE. Ananalysis of American publications offering advice on agreement found a correlation between stricter rules on singular agreement as well as teaching recommendations and agreement patterns in AmE. This suggests that modern English variation in collective noun agreement resulted from a conscious change, driven by language ideology and nationalism, to distinguish AmE from BrE through singular agreement preference.

The article discusses research that charts new lingua franca English data and broadensthe scope of written elf corpora. We illustrate that, apart from the academic domain,there exist various written genres in non-native contexts in which English is used as asecond language resource alongside native languages. These uncharted data can provideus with new ways of approaching the ongoing globalization of English. The newapproach incorporates a broader perspective on elf than previously, seeing it as onestage in the long diachronic continuum of Englishes rather than as an entity emergingin interaction. The first part details a corpus project that produces written multi-genrecorpora suitable for real-time studies of how ongoing variability is reflected in linguafranca use. It is followed by three case studies investigating quantitative patterns ofongoing change in elf. The conclusions suggest that a diachronically-informed angleto lingua franca use offers a new vantage point not only to elf but also to ongoinggrammatical variability. It shows that the traditional and canonized way of seeing nonnativespeakers/writers is not sufficient, nor is the simplified view of norm dependency of non-native individuals.

English collective nouns and their varying agreement patterns (as in (1)–(3) below) have received a great deal of attention in corpus linguistics. 

(1)    …and the police has not yet been aroused from its lethargy. (COHA; 1822; Magazine)

(2)    The borough police is even more completely under the authority of their own watch committee than is the county police (HANSARD; 1881; House of Commons (22))

(3)    The police claim to know where he is, but they will not tell. (COHA; 1894; Newspaper)

Previous synchronic research has found evidence of variability within and across the varieties of English, e.g. Levin (2001, 2006), Depraetere (2003), Hundt (2006, 2009a & b), Bock et al. (2006). The diachronic developments of this variation have not been investigated in greater detail, however. Furthermore, there is a lack of research with a narrower focus, putting more attention on a qualitative analysis of the collective noun itself by highlighting its lexical characteristics and its historical development from a sociolinguistic and semantic perspective.

This paper investigates the agreement patterns of the collective noun police and its conceptual predecessors watch and patrol in the American and British English varieties in the 19th century. It combines diachronic corpus linguistics and historical sociolinguistics by discussing the linguistic as well as the social history of the concept of police in America and Britain. The preliminary results are drawn from the Corpus of Historical American English and the Hansard corpus (both freely accessible via http://corpus.byu.edu/). They indicate that the change in the agreement pattern of the collective noun police indeed was conditioned by lexical and historical sociolinguistic. One finding suggests for instance that the agreement pattern of this collective noun changed from being variable towards a preference of plural agreement due to changes made in the organisation of the police patrols prior to the 1870s, which resulted in a shift from singularity towards plurality with regards to the public perception of ‘the patrolling police officer’. The results of this study show that also qualitative analyses can reveal factors which condition a change in the agreement patterns of at least some collective nouns.

Agreement with collective nouns has received a great deal of attention in English corpus linguistics. Previous research (e.g. Levin 2001, Hundt 2006) has shown that present-day AmE strongly prefers singular agreement with collective nouns, as illustrated in (1). However, much less is known about this phenomenon in the LME period, in which collective nouns were “notoriously troublesome as to number” (Denison 1998: 99).  [Author, masked] (2017) shows that the present-day preference for the singular was not yet established in 19th-century AmE, and that plural agreement (exemplified in (2)) was still frequently used.

(1)       The army was not in winter quarters now; it was in the field fighting, (COHA, 1913)

(2)       the army have gone into winter quarters (COHA, 1823)

This paper consists of two parts. First, the early 20th–century agreement patterns of 20 collective nouns (e.g. army, government, society) were investigated in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA, see Davis 2010). Finally, the resulting shares of singular and plural agreement were correlated to prescriptive comments from a collection of American grammars, school books and style guides (drawn from publicly available sources (e.g. Google Books)  and restricted databases, e.g. the Hyper Usage Guide of English) from the same time period to examine their influence on the emerging agreement patterns. This method is based on Anderwald’s (2016) quantitative grammaticography and is here applied to explain the aforementioned synchronic variability and thereby to contribute to the study of the emergence of the main varieties of English.

The findings suggest that the shift towards almost complete singular agreement with collective nouns in AmE occurred in the early 20th century. Furthermore, results indicate that collective noun agreement was frequently commented on in AmE grammars from the 19th century onwards. Indeed, it turns out that variation in agreement was in fact promoted at first. However, the preference of singular agreement, which we can witness today, seems to be the result of changes in the stance of 20th-century American grammars towards this topic, as exemplified by Mason (1928: 303), who in his college grammar argues that “[o]rdinarily [...] a Collective noun requires a Singular verb.” The motivation behind this change of attitude seems to be a conscious differentiation process of the incipient Standard AmE variety from its BrE ancestor, as exemplified by Grattan (1927: 437): “... by American standards, many idiomatic usages long sanctioned in Great Britain are still ‘bad grammar.’ Such [is] the construction of collective noun with plural verb… .”

Agreement with collective nouns has received a great deal of attention in English corpus linguistics. Previous research (e.g. Levin 2001, Hundt 2006) has shown that present-day AmE strongly prefers singular agreement with collective nouns, as illustrated in (1). However, much less is known about this phenomenon in the LME period, in which collective nouns were “notoriously troublesome as to number, and there has been much fluctuation over time” (Denison 1998: 99). Lakaw (forthcoming) shows that the present-day preference for the singular was not yet established in 19th-century AmE, and that plural agreement (exemplified in (2)) was still frequently used. He furthermore suggests that the shift towards the singular must have occurred in the early 20th century.

1. (1)  The army was not in winter quarters now; it was in the field fighting, (COHA, 1913)

2. (2)  the army have gone into winter quarters (COHA, 1823)

   This paper presents a study on the influence of prescriptivism on agreement

with collective nouns in early 20th-century AmE. The agreement patterns of 20 collective nouns (e.g. army, government, society) were investigated in COHA, and the resulting shares of singular and plural agreement were correlated to prescriptive comments from a collection of American grammars, school books and style guides (drawn from publicly available sources, e.g. Google Books) from the same time period to examine their influence on the emerging agreement patterns. This method is based on Anderwald’s (2016) quantitative grammaticography and is here applied to explain the aforementioned synchronic variability and thereby to contribute to the study of the emergence of the main varieties of English.

Preliminary findings in 19th-century AmE grammars indicate that collective noun agreement was frequently commented on. Indeed, it turns out that variation in agreement was in fact promoted. However, the preference for singular agreement, which we can witness today, seems to be the result of changes in the stance of 20th- century American grammars towards this topic, as exemplified by Mason (1928: 303), who in his college grammar argues that “[o]rdinarily [...] a Collective noun requires a Singular verb”.