36.3541, Confs: Workshop at BICLCE11: A Matter of Concord: English Agreement Across Varieties and Register (Austria)

Thu Nov 20 12:05:02 UTC 2025

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3541. Thu Nov 20 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3541, Confs: Workshop at BICLCE11: A Matter of Concord: English Agreement Across Varieties and Register (Austria)

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Date: 18-Nov-2025
From: Xulia Sánchez-Rodríguez [xulia.sanchez at uvigo.gal]
Subject: Workshop at BICLCE11: A Matter of Concord: English Agreement Across Varieties and Register

Workshop at BICLCE11: A Matter of Concord: English Agreement Across
Varieties and Register

Date: 03-Jul-2026 - 05-Jul-2026
Location: Klagenfurt, Austria
Meeting URL:
https://www.aau.at/en/english/conferences/biclce11/call-for-papers/thematic-session-5/

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Submission Deadline: 15-Jan-2026

Organizers:
David Hernández-Coalla (Universidade de Vigo),
david.hernandez at uvigo.gal
Xulia Sánchez-Rodríguez (Universidade de Vigo),
xulia.sanchez at uvigo.gal
Description:
Agreement has been at the center of linguistic debate for a long time.
In the case of English, its reduced morphological system has possibly
fostered research in subject-verb agreement from different
perspectives: theoretical, geographical, cognitive-based, among
others. In fact, a wide range of phenomena have/has received
particular attention:
– Collective agreement, especially in relation to the
syntactic-semantic agreement dichotomy and the differences exhibited
by bare collectives and quantifying- and grouping-like nouns
complemented by prepositional phrases headed by of (Levin 2001;
Fernández-Pena 2020).
– Complex subjects, such as coordinated noun phrases, where resolution
processes may determine the form taken by the agreement target
(Corbett 2006).
– Complexity-related topics: distance between the agreement-inducing
elements and the target (Fernández-Pena 2020; Lakaw 2024).
– Attraction “errors” resulting from the interference of intervening
linguistic material between the agreement probe and its goal
(Acuña-Fariña 2012).
– Agreement in non-canonical word order contexts: existential clauses,
it extrapolation, inversion… (Crawford 2005; Zhang & Yue 2024)
– Agreement across different varieties of English, examining both
shared patterns and variation between Inner- vs Outer-circle
varieties, with attention to substrate influences, language contact,
and sociolinguistic factors (Hundt 2006).
– Influence of register, considering variation in subject-verb
agreement across formal and informal contexts, spoken and written
language, and different levels of stylistic or situational formality,
highlighting how grammatical norms adapt to different communicative
contexts. (Crawford 2005)
The purpose of this workshop is to provide an overview of the
state-of-the-art work on these topics related to agreement in English
and bring together researchers working from multiple perspectives and
with evidence gathered with different methodologies. These include
corpus-based approaches with recent data (COCA, BNC14, GloWbE, etc.)
aided by computational linguistics, elicitation tests, and other
data-based/driven techniques. The results will be supplemented with
detailed qualitative and quantitative analyses and contextualized in
relation to different theoretical frameworks. By combining empirical
findings with conceptual and theoretical insights, the workshop aims
to advance our understanding of how agreement in English can be
described, explained, and modeled across different levels of analysis.
Call for Papers:
– For the Thematic Sessions, we invite proposals for individual papers
consisting of a 20-minute presentation followed by 10 minutes of
discussion
– The abstracts should conform to the BICLCE template:
(https://conference3.aau.at/event/156/attachments/116/305/Template_BICLCE11.docx)
  - Contents: theoretical framework, methodology, data, expected
findings
  - Extension: 300 words max. (excluding references)
  - References: Chicago Manual of Style (18th edition)
– Please submit abstracts via email directly to the workshop
organizers
– Deadline: 15 January 2026
– Notification of acceptance: 15 March 2026
References:
Acuña-Fariña, Carlos. 2012. Agreement, Attraction and Architectural
Opportunism. Journal of Linguistics 48 (2): 257-295.
Brezina, Vaclav, Abi Hawtin and Tony McEnery. 2021. The Written
British National Corpus 2014 – Design and Comparability. Text & Talk
41 (5-6): 595-615.
Corbett, Greville G. 2006. Agreement. Cambridge University Press &
Assessment: Cambridge.
Crawford, William J. 2005. Verb Agreement and Disagreement: A Corpus
Investigation of Concord Variation in Existential There + Be
Constructions. Journal of English Linguistics 33 (1): 35-61.
Davies, Mark. (2008–). The Corpus of Contemporary American English
(COCA): One billion words, 1990–2019.
https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/
Davies, Mark. 2013. Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE).
https://www.english-corpora.org/glowbe/
Fernández-Pena, Yolanda. 2020. Reconciling Synchrony, Diachrony and
Usage in Verb Number Agreement with Complex Collective Subjects. New
York: Routledge.
Hundt, Marianne. 2006. The Committee Has/Have Decided…: On Concord
Patterns with Collective Nouns in Inner- and Outer varieties of
English. Journal of English Linguistics 34 (3): 206-232.
Lakaw, Alexander. 2024. Agreement with Collective Nouns: Diachronic
Corpus Studies of American and British English. PhD dissertation.
Växjö: Linnaeus University Press.
Levin, Magnus. 2001. Agreement with Collective Nouns in English. Lund:
Department of English of Lund University.
Love, Robbie, Claire Dembry, Andrew Hardie, Vaclav Brezina and Tony
McEnery. 2017. The Spoken BNC2014: Designing and Building a Spoken
Corpus of everyday Conversations. International Journal of Corpus
Linguistics 22 (3): 319– 344.
Zhang, Yi and Ming Yue. 2024. Case and Agreement Variation in Contact:
A Multifactorial Investigation of it-clefts across World Englishes.
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 4: 472-506.

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