Common use of Collective nouns and the verb 'to be' Clause in Contracts

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: (4.1) The active duty force of the British Army is more than 212,000 strong, making it the second largest army in the European Union behind France. (xxxx://xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxx.xxxxxxxx.xxx/) (4.2) The idea of a professional army is increasingly popular in Spain, too. (The Economist. London: The Economist Newspaper Ltd, 1991) Because in Example 4.1 the head noun of the phrase is the noun duty and in Example 4.2 the head noun is the noun idea, we cannot use these, or similar sentences in our analysis. Therefore, we excluded all sentences where the noun army was not head noun, and after doing that we got a total of 3,266 results for army is. We did the same thing for army are. First, when we typed army are into the search box we got 518 results, but after excluding all sentences where the noun army was not head noun we had 476 results left. We repeated this action for every collective noun from our list. Although we did our best to select only the sentences which have the collective nouns as head nouns, we are still aware of the fact that some results may not be entirely correct. Since the selection was done only by one person, some sentences may have been overlooked and left in our analysis. According to Xxxxx (1994:63) 'there appears to be a general trend for singular concord', so, too see if this also goes for the collective nouns that we are studying, we will look at our data, summarized below in Table 4.1 and Graph 4.1. Family 14,021 5,035 Gang 304 201 Government 16,998 972 Group 14,338 1,860 As we can see, the results in Table 4.1 and Graph 4.1 suggest that there is a preference for singular agreement. Especially, if we compare the nouns family, group and government. Comparing these three collective nouns, it is definitely obvious that there is a strong preference for singular concord. In the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE) we had remarkable 14,338 hits for the noun group with singular concord, and only 1860 hits with plural concord. The noun family had 14,021 hits for singular concord and 5,035 for plural concord and the noun government had 16,998 hits for singular and only 972 for plural concord. According to Xxxxxxxxxx et al (2009:29) nouns that prefer singular concord over plural even in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English are for example army and committee. Our results also agree with this statement since the noun army had 3,266 hits for singular concord and 476 for plural concord. The noun committee had 4,012 hits for singular concord and only 655 hits for plural concord. It is interesting, as suggested by Xxxxxx (1969:107), that another significant factor can influence concord. Collective nouns preceded by determiners or numerals associated with singular forms (e.g. a, one, every, each, this and that) are frequently used with singular verbs. As seen in the example below: (4.3) Not that every married couple is happy (…) This is also an important factor when it comes to concord, but it was not the focus of our analysis. The data shown in the present section clearly indicates that in written English there is a clear preference for singular concord. In the next section we shall find out if this also goes for the national varieties of English and if any differences between these varieties occur.