Abstract
While numerous collective nouns have attracted attention for their pronominal number agreement, this
synchronic study investigates two nouns — government and family. Each noun is treated as a case study with
its own agreement profile. Using a dataset from the British National Corpus (BNC), the study provides a
comprehensive account of these nouns and explores how the structural distance between a collective
noun and its anaphoric pronoun affects number agreement patterns in British English. This study offers a
quantitative analysis that explicitly measures boundary position, incorporating syntactic boundaries (same
clause; different clause in the same sentence; following sentence). It provides new empirical evidence for a
frequently asserted but rarely quantified claim. The data were extracted from the BNC by identifying
tokens where a collective noun was followed, within ten words, by an anaphoric pronoun. After manual
filtering, in which ambiguous and non-anaphoric cases were excluded, each remaining instance was coded
by boundary position to model pronominal agreement. The findings reveal that plural pronominal
agreement becomes more likely as syntactic separation increases, and syntactic boundaries do not affect
all nouns equally: agreement patterns depend on the specific noun, not merely on its status as a collective
noun. In short, distance effects are robust but noun-specific. The study, therefore, offers a practical
framework for extending boundary-sensitive analyses to other collective nouns and linguistic registers.
Keywords: agreement; British National Corpus (BNC); British English; collective nouns; syntactic boundaries
