Forms of Anaphoric Reference to Organisational Named Entities: Hoping to widen appeal, they diversified

Abstract

Proper names of organisations are a special case of collective nouns. Their meaning can be conceptualised as a collective unit or as a plurality of persons, permitting different morphological marking of anaphoric pronouns. This paper explores the variability of references to organisation names with 1) a corpus analysis and 2) two crowd-sourced story continuation experiments. The first shows the bias for singular vs. plural conceptualisation depends on the level of formality of a text. In the second, we observe a strong preference for plural they typical of informal speech. This preference is reduced for edited corpus data compared with constructed sentences.