Common use of Use of collective nouns in spoken corpora Clause in Contracts

Use of collective nouns in spoken corpora. In this section we shall focus on the differences that occur in spoken English, and see if the results that we get are any different from the results we got in Section 4.2. We will use the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) to compare the number of results according to frequency in spoken English, to see how often each agreement pattern (Sg or Pl) occurs in the spoken language. Obviously, since we are using the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), our focus in this part of the analysis will only be on AmE. Biber (1988:47) says that writing is claimed to be “more structurally complex and elaborate”, and “more deliberately organized and planned than speech”. Therefore, we expect that people would use in writing singular agreement more often than in speech, since singular agreement seems to be the "right" choice. Speech is usually produced spontaneously, so grammatical correctness can often be ignored. That is the reason why some studies of collective nouns, such as Xxxxx (2001), had more results for plural concord in spoken English than in written English. We begin our analysis of the use of collective nouns in spoken corpora by looking at the results from Table 4.4 and Graph 4.4. Here we can see the distribution of singular and plural agreement in spoken AmE.