a query

[Brian MacWhinney]

On 4/3/02 12:19 PM, "Annette Karmiloff-Smith"
<a.karmiloff-smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk> wrote:

> In British English it is becoming increasingly apparent that semantic
> representations can at times override syntactic constraints with
> respect to singular nouns denoting groups.
> For example, one frequently hears:
>
> the public are.............
> the government are....
> the country are...........
> the royal family are....
>
> This one hears not only in everyday conversation but also on BBC
> radio etc. and in written documents.
>
> Query:      Is this peculiar to British English or also found in
> American English?
> Do other languages use a plural verb with singular noun?  I
> am almost certain French,
> Spanish and German never do.
> If this only occurs in English, is it because this language
> lacks grammatical gender and
> nominative case?  Or other causes?
>
> Just curious!
> Annette
>


Dear Annette,

This is a well-documented difference between British and American varieties
of English.  For example, "A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language"
by Quirk et al discusses this in sections 10.34 and 10.35 with many
examples.

Researchers like Bock and Vigliocco have studied the general issue of
semantic motivation for number assignment in subject-verb agreement, as
opposed to syntactic or formal assignment.  And there are many linguistic
analyses of these two dimensions of motivation.

Italian, for example, has nouns that are not clearly marked for number on
the noun itself, but usually the article gives away the number.  This is
what is lacking in English and why perhaps we can get away with this.  If
you either don't have additional number marking or perhaps have your number
marking on articles and modifiers neutralized as in German feminine and
various parts of the Slavic paradigm, then you should get this there too, I
would say.  In Hungarian, you say "two dog" instead of "two dogs" and then
the verb is supposed to be singular too.  However, children at first make
some mistakes on this and even adults will waffle when the technically
singular (but conceptually plural) antecedent is several clauses back.

   Note that one has to treat this as a fairly squishy
semantic/pragmatic/syntactic conflict, rather than as a case of tight
determination, since the actual grammars of American and British varieties
are not that different.  Rather this seems like more of an expressive
difference, somewhat as in the Hungarian case.

This would be a good question for the FUNKNET bboard too, by the way.

--Brian MacWhinney