Exploring the Patterns of Verbal Agreement of Collective Noun-Headed Subjects in a Parsed Corpus of Present-Day English * Yolanda Fernández-Pena University of Vigo, Vigo, Spain yolanda.fernandez@uvigo.es Abstract This study explores verbal agreement variation with collective noun-headed subjects taking plural of-dependents in a set of data retrieved from a parsed version of the corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE). The results show how syntactic distance between the subject and the verb (and also the complexity of the modifier(s) of the of-PP) reduces the influence that these plural of-PPs exert on the verb, thus lowering the rate of plural agreement. 1 Introduction In this paper, I will first outline some basic concepts pertaining to verbal agreement with collective nouns in Section 2, and the main aims of this study as well as the methodological procedure applied in Section 3. In Section 4, I will present the data analysis, which covers two questions: regional variation and syntactic complexity. Finally, I will put forward the conclusions in Section 5. 2 Variation in Verbal Agreement with Collective Nouns Collective noun-headed subjects, i.e. those which denote “a group of animates or inanimates” (e.g. committee, party, series, number), usually take singular or plural verbs according to whether the speaker focuses on the collectivity (1) or on its individuals (2) (Dekeyser 1975, 35fn1, 37; see also Biber et al. 1999: 188). * This study has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Regional Development Fund (grants no. FFI2013-44065-P, FFI2014-51873-REDT and FPU FPU13/01509), and the Autonomous Government of Galicia (Secretary General of Universities, grants no. GPC2014/060 and R2014/016). I would like to express my gratitude to Javier Pérez Guerra for his valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. I am also grateful to Marianne Hundt, Hans M. Lehmann and Gerold Schneider for giving me access to the Dependency Bank interface and to David Tizón-Couto for his help and advice. EPiC Series in Language and Linguistics Volume 2, 2017, Pages 325–334 Professional and Academic Discourse: an Interdisciplinary Perspective C.Vargas-Sierra (ed.), AESLA 2016 (EPiC Series in Language and Linguistics, vol. 2), pp. 325–334