Yolanda Fernández-Pena has obtained a competitive four-year FPU grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education. Yolanda’s PhD project is entitled “Agreement in number with collective nouns in English”. This investigation will analyse the controversial issue of agreement in number with collective nouns in both the standard varieties of English (British and American) and the different geographical variants of this same language. Taking as a point of departure the previous investigations on this topic, this study will account for the current state of the art of this question by means of resorting to different corpora of contemporary English like COCA or BNC. Historical corpora like COHA or ARCHER will be also taken into account so as to explore the evolution this issue has undergone throughout the history of the English language. Furthermore, corpora like B-LOB, B-Brown or GloWbE, which have been published very recently, will be used to examine the great variation agreement has suffered in the different varieties of English as well as to investigate how differently agreement markers are used in those varieties. Yolanda’s dissertation, which integrates innovative approaches like psycholinguistics and corpus linguistics along with English historical linguistics and textual statistics, will comprise a grammatical study accounting for the variation of agreement in number observed in modern and contemporary English, especially in the New Englishes or non-native varieties.
