Non-verbal plural number agreement: a pilot study comparing selected functional nouns in English and German using Oslo Multilingual Corpus data

• Authors: Karolina Rudnicka

Title variants

DE

Nonverbale Kongruenz im Numerus: eine Pilotstudie zum Vergleich ausgewählter funktionaler Substantive im Englischen und Deutschen unter Verwendung der Daten des Oslo Multilingual Korpus

• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Non-verbal plural number agreement is, especially in the cross-linguistic context, an under-researched topic. English and German seem to differ with regard to number preference in objects, adverbials and modifiers following plural subjects. While English prefers the distributive plural – direct correspondence in number between the (formally or notionally) plural subject of a clause and a nominal clause element in the predicate part of this clause, German seems to be much more open to variation and may even appear to prefer the distributive singular. The present paper aims to take the first steps towards the verification of these supposed differences by means of a pilot corpus-based study conducted with the use of the Oslo Multilingual Corpus (OMC) – a parallel corpus containing original texts and their translations. The three nouns looked at are head/heads, life/lives, voice/voices, and their German equivalents. The results show that the preference towards the distributive plural is indeed the norm for English as it can be used in almost any context, while in German, it is a much more context- and noun-specific feature.

Keywords

EN

non-verbal number agreement; distributiveness; English; German; distributive plural; distributive singular; corpus linguistics

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Institute of the Czech Language, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Slovo a slovesnost: časopis pro otázky teorie a kultury jazyka (Slovo a slovesnost: A journal for the theory of language and language cultivation)
• Year: 2024
• Volume: 85
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 27-54
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Karolina Rudnicka

• Slovo a slovesnost, redakce, Ústav pro jazyk český AV ČR, v.v.i., Letenská 4, 118 51 Praha 1, Czech Republic