| Abstrakt: |
It is commonly acknowledged that agreement with collective nouns tends towards the singular in current American English, with the plural more frequent in British English, while New Zealand and Australian English fall somewhere in between. This paper reports on a diachronic study into agreement patterns in New Zealand English, and shows how patterns may be shifting among a number of nouns. The data come from a recently compiled corpus of NZE newspaper material which covers the period from the mid-1990s to the early 2010s. A large selection of the wide range of eligible nouns is examined to identify any discernible patterns, and the nouns under investigation are divided into two groups according to whether any statistically significant change is detected in their agreement preferences over the 15-year period. The results indicate that a number of nouns show an increasing preference for plural agreement in New Zealand English. Further, a short survey carried out with a group of advanced second language learners showed that, in the case of at least one collective noun, non-native speakers are not in agreement with New Zealand English speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
