Abstract
This paper reports the results of a quantitative contrastive study of English and German in the area of syntactic vs. semantic concord - the agreement of number of subject and verb if the subject is semantically plural but syntactically singular. Based on English and German newspaper corpora, I look at constructions with quantifying nouns of the form [a number/bunch/heap of NPL] and their German equivalents [ein(e) Reihe/Menge/Haufen von NPL]. I show that there is variation in both languages, and the influencing factors are the same in both languages. Semantic motivation could explain the variation in German, however, it does not hold for English. Based on these results, I argue for more careful propositions on semantic motivations even if cognitively plausible, and instead more contrastive work that can bring to light language specific differences in the construal of semantic categories such as number.
© 2018 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston