Chapter 4. Non-verbal plural number agreement. Between the distributive plural and singular

Abstract

Unlike Slavic languages, such as Polish and Czech, English is assumed to prefer distributive plural agreement between the plural subject and the noun in the predicate part of the sentence. The aim of this paper is to verify this claim and (since this preference is apparently not without exceptions) provide an overview of scenarios in which the tendency for the distributive plural is overruled. We start with a classification of factors blocking the use of the plural and enabling the use of distributive singular. The preference is tested by reviewing the occurrences of two constructions, lose one’s life and lose one’s job, in the BNC and COCA, In view of the distributive singular cases in the dataset, the chapter investigates the possibility of the distributive plural and singular cases being in a free variation and proposes a new condition for them to be seen as such: they need to have a similar distribution across different genres.