Verbal Agreement and the Grammar behind its 'Breakdown'

Rules of agreement, or concord, account for the special relationship between the verb and the 'subject' that exists in most languages. In many traditional grammars, it is taken for granted that this agreement occurs and usually only the cases of 'lack of concord' are discussed. The book examines rules accounting for the agreement phenomena (mostly in a recent Chomskian framework) as well as account for the instances where agreement is 'deficient' and show this is due to expletives, word order, coordination and language change. Rather than regard the lack of agreement as 'deficient', it will be considered as indicative of syntactic structure.