CONVERGING CORPUS ANALYSES Clause Samples

CONVERGING CORPUS ANALYSES. Although the rates of collective attraction in experiments 3 and 4 are consistent with the hypothesis that the difference between British and American speakers is primarily one of grammatical number categorization, they were low enough to make converging evidence desirable. To strengthen the conclu- sion, we examined more closely the corpus distributions of plural verbs used with the collectives from our sample. Figure 4 shows the results for the collectives that occurred at least once as the subjects of verbs in the British and American corpora. The graph indicates the percentage range of plural verbs that accompanied each collective when the collective headed the verb’s subject. The incidence of plural verb use is given in 10% intervals between 0 and 100%. As before, percentages were calculated from the number of unambiguous plural verbs relative to the total of unambiguous singular and unambiguous plural verbs.