7.3 Group 4, or ‘How many are Greenpeace anyway?’

In the last group, we basically used all of the techniques above. One major difference was that our object of interest, Greenpeace, was old enough to study in a larger corpus, in this case the original BNC.

We discovered that Greenpeace is used both as a collective noun, i.e. a noun that can both act as a plural or as a singular syntactically.

29. That is why Greenpeace have had to take the moral initiative.
30. but its Greenpeace has 600,000 members

There is a variety of interesting questions that we could ask at this point. When is there plural agreement and when is there singular agreement? We could also see whether the association has an influence on the choice. Is Greenpeace like any collective noun, such as police or audience or are there differences? What is the function and what is the effect of using either plural or singular? What is the relationship to metonymy in this case?