Subject-verb agreement in existential constructions in contemporary American English : a corpus-based study

Abstract EN

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 American- English.

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.