Sin and deres with plural antecedents in KorpusDK

The Danish possessive reflexive sin (sit, sine) has primarily been used with singular antecedents for at least 800 years.A speaker may say that She drove home in sin car but Karen and Per drove home in sin deres car.The non-reflexive third person plural possessive deres is usually used instead of sin when the subject antecedent is plural.It is, however, not uncommon to find sin used with plural antecedents in modern Danish, also in more formal contexts.In this study, I investigate the occurrence of sin with plural antecedents in KorpusDK.The study builds on a manual read-through of approximately 55,000 corpus sentences, and almost every instance of sin with plural antecedents in KorpusDK is included in the study.The study finds that sin does occur with plural antecedents in this reasonably formal written corpus, although deres is still the most frequent form.I compare the use of sin with plural antecedents with the standard forms, deres with plural antecedents and sin with singular antecedents.The use of sin with plural antecedents is clearly different from the standard forms in regard to e.g.animacy and distributivity.I conclude that sin with plural antecedents is a systematically conditioned variant in the corpus and not "just" an agreement error.