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 //LMWM9W
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UID:pretalx-athens-2026-LMWM9W@conference-hub.linguistic-society.com
DTSTART:20260422T150000Z
DTEND:20260422T151500Z
DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nWhile numerous collective nouns have attracted attent
 ion for their pronominal number agreement\, this\nsynchronic study investi
 gates two nouns — government and family. Each noun is treated as a case 
 study with\nits own agreement profile. Using a dataset from the British Na
 tional Corpus (BNC)\, the study provides a\ncomprehensive account of these
  nouns and explores how the structural distance between a collective\nnoun
  and its anaphoric pronoun affects number agreement patterns in British En
 glish. This study offers a\nquantitative analysis that explicitly measures
  boundary position\, incorporating syntactic boundaries (same\nclause\; di
 fferent clause in the same sentence\; following sentence). It provides new
  empirical evidence for a\nfrequently asserted but rarely quantified claim
 . The data were extracted from the BNC by identifying\ntokens where a coll
 ective noun was followed\, within ten words\, by an anaphoric pronoun. Aft
 er manual\nfiltering\, in which ambiguous and non-anaphoric cases were exc
 luded\, each remaining instance was coded\nby boundary position to model p
 ronominal agreement. The findings reveal that plural pronominal\nagreement
  becomes more likely as syntactic separation increases\, and syntactic bou
 ndaries do not affect\nall nouns equally: agreement patterns depend on the
  specific noun\, not merely on its status as a collective\nnoun. In short\
 , distance effects are robust but noun-specific. The study\, therefore\, o
 ffers a practical\nframework for extending boundary-sensitive analyses to 
 other collective nouns and linguistic registers.\nKeywords: agreement\; Br
 itish National Corpus (BNC)\; British English\; collective nouns\; syntact
 ic boundaries
DTSTAMP:20260419T081743Z
LOCATION:Online Session
SUMMARY:Syntactic Boundaries and Pronominal Agreement with British Collecti
 ve Nouns - Awasha Atiega
URL:https://conference-hub.linguistic-society.com/athens-2026/talk/LMWM9W/
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