Agreement Variation in English Existential Constructions

Abstract

This thesis focuses on providing an account of the variation in agreement in English existential constructions of the form There-BE-plural NP. Copular agreement in these constructions can be either singular or plural. Unlike most English sentences, which show verbal agreement with the syntactic subject (the element in Spec, TP), standard agreement in these constructions is assumed to show number agreement with the plural, post-copular NP. Though many English speakers prefer the plural agreement, the full and abbreviated singular is attested and must be accounted for. This thesis aims to provide a syntactic and semantic account of the agreement patterns within these constructions. Semantic conclusions are drawn from a semantic judgment survey which investigated the effect of agreement type on NP interpretation. The syntactic account mainly draws on the notion that number agreement is the result of an NP moving before the verb at some point in the derivation (Kayne 2011), and the parallels between English existentials and Icelandic constructions involving long-distance agreement (Kučerová 2016).