Er politiet sikker eller sikre? Adjektivkongruens ved kollektiver i norsk

Abstract

This is an empirical study of adjectival agreement in Norwegian. We investigate sentences with a collective noun as a subject and a predicative adjective in the singular or plural. On the basis of data from two corpora and a survey, we demonstrate that plural agreement is widespread in Norwegian sentences of the relevant type. The following factors are shown to be significantly associated with the choice between singular and plural: animacy and semantic type of subject, distance between subject and predicative adjective, adjective vs. participle, and the adjective’s role as an indicator of agency. The corpus data are analyzed by means of a logistic regression model.