Agreement with Collective Nouns in English and Romanian: A Silent Noun and Distributional Approach

The current study looks at agreement with collective nouns with functional heads (such as mulţime ‘multitude’/ multitude) and semi-lexical heads (such as poliţie ‘police’/ police) in English and Romanian. Regarding collective nouns with functional heads, both English and Romanian allow both singular and plural agreement. However, while English allows both singular and plural agreement with collectives with semi-lexical collective heads, Romanian only allows singular agreement. The study proposes a silent noun and distributional account to explain this puzzling behaviour. On the one hand, it argues that all collective nouns involve two nominals, but NP2 may be silent. On the other hand, it argues that collectives with a semi-lexical first nominal are subject to a crosslinguistic agreement parameter, such that in English, agreement is variable, while in Romanian, it is not. One possible reason for this difference could be related to whether the second nominal in a collective is subject-like or not. In English, both nominals in a collective extended projection may be subjects (the first is a DP, and the second is a bare noun). In Romanian, however, only the first nominal (DP1) can be a subject, while the second (NP2) cannot, since bare nouns typically do not function as subjects in Romanian. Because of this, in semi-lexical collective nouns, Romanian speakers realize agreement only with the subject-like DP1.