This project aims to explore both linguistic complexity and diatopic variation in English in relation to the phenomenon of subject-predicate agreement and to make available on an online platform the resulting database with data extracted from a corpus of contemporary Englishes. The project will apply multifactorial/multivariate models to the data extracted from the corpus in order to identify the factors that determine variation in subject-predicate agreement. Specifically, it will explore variation in verbal agreement in number with simple and complex subjects (with dependents, in coordination) in both unmarked (canonical) sentences (SV(X)) and thematically-marked sentences (inversion, existential constructions, clefts) in the 20 varieties of English represented in the Corpus Global Web-based English (GloWbE).The topic will be approached from a multidimensional perspective, carrying out detailed quantitative, qualitative and statistical analyses of the morphosyntactic factors, especially those related to linguistic complexity, and lexical-semantic factors that potentially determine verb number. The ultimate goal is to characterise subject-predicate agreement in English based on data from real contexts in different diatopic varieties of the language in order to contribute to a theory of complexity, and linguistic and diatopic variation.
