Abstrakt
While concord between the subject and the verb belongs to one of the most basic grammatical features of Standard English, a group of constructions exists in which the compliance to this rule is often flouted. One of the most frequent and frequently-quoted examples in this regard are existential there-clauses.
Features which are recognized as contributing to the frequency of non-concord include reduced verbal form 's, a lexical material intervening between the predicate and the notional noun phrase, such as a disjunct, length and/or complexity of the post-verbal sequence. Recognizing the role of the clitic 's as influential to the resulting concord, the aim of this study is to try and isolate the remaining factors by focusing on non-concord in syntactic structures in which the use of reduced forms is not possible, i.e. in polar questions.
The paper is based on data obtained from the original spoken component of the British National Corpus in comparison with the newly released BNC2014.