Sujetos colectivos y concordancia verbalUn estudio de frecuencias, semántica y sintaxis

  1. Fernández-Pena, Yolanda
Journal:
RAEL: revista electrónica de lingüística aplicada

ISSN: 1885-9089

Year of publication: 2017

Volume: 16

Issue: 1

Pages: 70-84

Type: Article

More publications in: RAEL: revista electrónica de lingüística aplicada

Abstract

This paper presents a corpus-based study which sheds light on the agreement patterns of complex collective subjects (also called here Ncol of Npl) and, in particular, on the influence that the prepositional phrase (of Npl) exerts on those patterns. To this end, I have explored syntactic factors, such as the morphological realisation of the Npl as well as syntactic complexity and syntactic distance, and semantic factors such as the animacy of the referent of Npl. The results of this investigation demonstrate the relevance of these factors: the overtly-marked plurality of Npl favours a higher rate of plural verbal forms in contrast to those instances where Npl show non-overtly-marked plurality. The same trend is also found with animate versus inanimate referents of Npl. Syntactic complexity and syntactic distance, by contrast, show a different tendency, as they tend to correlate with a lower incidence of plural verbal forms

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