ABSTRACT
This chapter reports the results of a corpus-based study of verb agreement variation with complex collective subjects in Present-Day English. It uncovers the determinants of verb agreement variation with these complex NP subjects. The chapter describes the corpora and data retrieval procedure used. It describes the variables surveyed and the statistical techniques applied to the data. The chapter includes a separate analysis of the impact of regional variation on agreement patterning using British and American data from the British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English, and data for other ‘Englishes’ retrieved from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English. It describes all the variables coded in the database as potential predictors of verb number agreement variation with Ncoll-of-N subjects.
