Magnus Levin

Collective nouns and language change

This study concerns the changing and variable agreement patterns with 21 low-frequency collective nouns (e.g. trio) in British English. The data comes from the 1990 and 2000 CD-ROM editions of The Independent. The token frequencies of nouns do not appear to affect the preference for singular verb agreement. There are however clear differences between noun types, as is typical for lexical diffusion. Most nouns have developed a strong preference for singular verb agreement, some remain variable and some prefer the plural. Many of the agreement patterns for individual nouns can be motivated with reference to the characteristics of the nouns rather than to the semantics of the verbs. This investigation found no evidence that singular verb agreement, which is argued in this study to be the unmarked alternative, is generally on the increase. Rather it seems that nouns which prefer plural verbs continue to move towards plural agreement.

Douglas Biber and Bethany Gray. Grammatical complexity in academic English. Linguistic change in writing : Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2016. 277 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-00926-4

Douglas Biber and Bethany Gray. Grammatical complexity in academic English. Linguistic change in writing : Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2016. 277 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-00926-4

On the face of it. How recurrent phrases organize text.

This study concerns the text-organizing functions of the recurrent phrases on the face of it, on its face and in (the) face of. It is argued that the development of the pragmatic meanings is related to grammaticalization theory. It is demonstrated that the two former phrases often occur in constructions where they are followed by a hedge and a refutation (on the face of it … this seems … But…). In (the) face of mainly organizes text through its connection with negative evaluations (e.g. in the face of opposition). The new Time and COCA corpora compiled by Mark Davies are shown to be useful complements to the BNC. These corpora show that on its face is typical of American English, and that the article-less variant in face of is rare, and possibly decreasing in use.