Variation between American English and British English. Interestingly, the distributions of singular verb agreement from Section 4.1 are similar to those in Tables and Graphs 4.2 and 4.3 below. But before we start discussing the data, summarized in Graph 4.2, we should mention that in this part of the analysis and in those which follow in Sections 4.3 and 4.4, we also looked for collective nouns followed by different forms of the verb to be in the Simple Present Tense, but this time, we did not exclude sentences where the collective nouns were not head nouns. This being said, we have to be aware of the fact that our results are not entirely correct, since the Tables 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4 give us the initial results from the search box. In Tables 4.2 and 4.3 we see the results from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE). Table 4.2 Use of singular and plural verbs with collective nouns in AmE Collective noun Singular (is) Plural (are) Army 575 74 Clan 42 15 Class 2,061 441 Club 595 62 Committee 599 96 Crew 285 186 Crowd 449 89 Family 3,580 932 Flock 48 12 Gang 96 56 Government 6,376 481 Group 2,985 515 Herd 59 8 Jury 474 11 Majority 433 359 Minority 131 46 Graph 4.2 Use of singular and plural verbs with collective nouns in AmE As we can see above, all of the collective nouns we studied occurred preferably with a singular verb form. Again, the nouns family, government and group are standing out. The noun family had 3,580 hits for singular concord and 932 hits for plural concord. The noun government had 6,376 hits for singular concord and 481 hits for plural concord and the noun group had 2,985 hits for singular concord and only 515 hits for plural concord. Singular verb agreement is not only the most frequent alternative in AmE writing, but also in AmE speech, but we shall concentrate on that more in Section 4.3. Now we will focus on the use of singular and plural verbs with the same collective nouns in BrE in the Table 4.3. Table 4.3 Use of singular and plural verbs with collective nouns in BrE Collective noun Singular (is) Plural (are) Army 613 124 Clan 42 24 Class 1,135 319 Club 3,236 911 Committee 610 152 Crew 182 258 Crowd 343 215 Family 2,157 1616 Flock 34 5 Gang 63 72 Government 6,179 1,528 Group 2,778 752 Herd 47 9 Majority 302 605 Minority 92 85 Graph 4.3 Use of singular and plural verbs with collective nouns in BrE To begin with, the Graph 4.3 shows that, on the whole, i.e. for most nouns, singular verb agreement is used more often than plural verb agreement in written BrE. Our results also indicate ...
