Subject-Verb Agreement in Existential Constructions in Contemporary American English: A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

This study investigates the variable subject-verb agreement in existential constructions in the Corpus of Contemporary American-English (COCA). While variable subject-verb agreement in existential constructions has been extensively studied in many varieties of English, we study this variation in a particular corpus to find out the correlation between the distribution of the standard and non-standard subject-verb agreement variants in American-English and a number of linguistic factors (tense, contraction, kind of plural and adjacency of subject and verb). To achieve this goal, a total of 375 tokens of standard and non-standard agreement in existential constructions are extracted from the corpus and coded in terms of the aforementioned linguistic factors. The data are then analyzed using a computer program, namely Goldvarb X, which is capable of providing the frequencies of the standard and non-standard variants in the extracted tokens. The results of the study confirm the findings of the previous studies and hypotheses. Present tense, contraction, absence of plural-s, and presence of intervening material are found to favor singular agreement in existential constructions in contemporary spoken AmericanEnglish. In addition, processing, default, and lexicalization hypotheses (Walker, 2007) are supported by the absence of plural-s, intervening material, and the high frequency of occurrence of there'srespectively. Keywords: Contemporary American English, corpus linguistics, existential constructions, language variation & change, variationist approach.