A matter of concord: English agreement across varieties and registers

Conveners:

David Hernández-Coalla (Universidade de Vigo), david [dot] hernandez [at] uvigo [dot] gal

Xulia Sánchez-Rodríguez (Universidade de Vigo), xulia [dot] sanchez [at] uvigo [dot] 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.

SUBMIT YOUR ABSTRACT

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 template found HERE.

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.