English Language and Linguistics 3, 173-207, 1999.
The paper rejects the standard view according to which every tensed verb in English agrees with its subject in person and number. It argues that person is irrelevant to all verbs except "BE", and that past-tense verbs and modals (other than "BE") have no number agreement. It discusses agreement mismatches which reflect the subject's meaning, but rejects the idea that subject-verb agreement may be a semantic rule; it proposes instead a new feature `agreement-number' which applies to the subject of a tensed verb and which also accommodates the peculiarities of "I" and "you". It also offers analyses of non-nominal subjects, dummy "there" and a range of variations found in non- standard dialects. The theoretical basis for the analysis is Word Grammar, whose main advantage is that features are free to be assigned by rule because they are not used in classification.