Semantic agreement over syntactic agreement. Acceptability of sentences in which different possessive pronouns refer to collective nouns

Abstract

Collective nouns (such as bestuur ‘board’, familie ‘family’) have an inherent contradiction in number: they are syntactically singular, but semantically plural. In Dutch, not only semantic number agreement, but also semantic gender agreement is an important factor for referring to a collective noun. The feminine possessive pronoun haar ‘her’ can be used to refer to such a noun regardless of its grammatical gender. To investigate the effects of semantic agreement, an acceptability judgement experiment was conducted with sentences in which possessive pronouns (hun ‘their’, haar ‘her’, or zijn ‘his’) referred to a collective noun. Sentences in which haar ‘her’ referred to a collective noun were the most acceptable, followed by sentences in which hun ‘their’ referred to a collective noun, and sentences in which zijn ‘his’ referred to a collective noun received the lowest ratings. As an exploratory part, acceptability distributions for each collective noun were visualised to create groups.