ABSTRACT
This chapter reports the results of a qualitative and quantitative diachronic study on the historical evolution of a selection of complex collective noun phrases designed to determine the impact of lexical issues on their agreement patterns. It describes the corpora used and the data retrieval process. The meaning evoked by each construction also differs from that of other periphrastic quantifiers in that, in this instance, both a majority of and the majority of denote partitive meaning. Milsark’s test for distinguishing between relative and absolute quantifying readings offers further evidence for the analysis of minority and majority as relative quantifiers. The quantitative and qualitative analyses reported demonstrate that semantic and syntactic changes go hand in hand in these constructions, with the syntactic structure becoming progressively more fixed and the lexical meaning being gradually bleached in favour of a quantificational reading.
