Acordul substantivelor colective

This paper discusses the variation in the agreement of collective nouns in Romanian and the factors that may trigger plural agreement. In standard Romanian, singular collective nouns trigger singular agreement on the verb, but in the colloquial registry plural agreement can be found, as indicated by several attested examples. We made a questionnaire in which we tested several factors that can influence the acceptability of plural agreement: the semantic type of collective noun, the presence of a plural adjunct, the semantic type of verb (which can emphasize the members of the group, rather than the ensemble), adverbials or quantifiers which trigger the individualized or the group reading, the topic etc. The questionnaire included 45 sentences and 126 subjects answered to it, on Google forms. The subjects had to rate the acceptability of the sentences, on a scale from 1 to 4. A synthesis of their answers is presented in the annex.