Collective nouns and the verb 'to be'. In this section, as already mentioned in the section above, we will use the verb 'to be' , since it is the most common verb used in the English language. More specifically, we shall search the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE) for all collective noun subjects followed by different forms of the verb to be in the Simple Present Tense, to see how frequently the collective nouns are used with specific verb forms. We shall see, according to these results, if the collective nouns occur more frequently with the singular or plural verb form. When we started our analysis, we searched the corpus, for example, for the collective noun army followed by the verb form is. By doing that we got a total of 3,879 results. But then we encountered some problems. For instance, we were looking for sentences which have the collective noun army as head noun (e.g. The army is spending about $75 million on building additional barracks.) and not sentences like the following examples:
Appears in 8 contracts
Samples: Number Agreement, Number Agreement, Number Agreement
