Committee, Staff, Council, etc.: A Corpus Analysis of Collective Nouns in Hong Kong English

Abstract

This corpus-based study reports on both a quantitative and a qualitative accounts of the use of collective nouns in Hong Kong English, with particular reference to subject-verb agreement/concord patterns. While the advantages of using corpus data in linguistic research have been widely recognised, researching into world Englishes through the exploitation of corpus-linguistic tools has been a relatively new endeavour. That having been said, the creation of the International Corpus of English (ICE) is undoubtedly the key to the emerging corpus-based approach. Since its inception in the late 1980s, the ICE project has successfully compiled comparable English corpora for quite a number of English-speaking contexts: East Africa, Great Britain, India, New Zealand, Philippines and Singapore. Specifically, the Hong Kong component of ICE (ICE-HK) was completed and available for public use in 2006. This study has benefited significantly from the ICE-HK corpus for a fairly large representative sample of Hong Kong English, examining singular collective nouns as subjects and how the following verb or pronoun agrees with them in number, as well as accessing previous claims that concord variations with collective nouns are semantically or pragmatically motivated by the traditional ‘collectivity vs individuality’ principle and the semantics of the following verb phrase. It has been found that singular concord is the preferred choice in over eighty percent of instances. It has also been demonstrated that convention rather than semantic/ pragmatic motivation plays a crucial role in concord patterns with collective nouns, with individual collective nouns showing their own preferences for a singular or plural form.