Grammatical concord in existential there-clauses

This thesis is concerned with the issue of non-concord between the notional subject and the verb in existential there-constructions. The grammatical subject in these sentences is the existential there but it is the agreement with the notional subject that is generally considered grammatically correct. This study focuses on the cases in which there is a discrepancy between the plural form of the notional subject and the singular form of the verb to be. The phrase there + sg. to be and especially the contracted form there's has apparently evolved into a presentative formula due to the process of grammaticalization. The thesis approaches this issue from the perspective of today's language as well as diachronically. Specifically, this study aims to identify the contexts in which this type of non-concord was possible in Early Modern English. To this aim 100 instances of existential there-constructions displaying a lack of agreement have been selected from three corpora of Early Modern English (CED, EEBO and PCEEC), which will then be examined in the analytical part of this thesis. The analysis itself is firstly concerned with the verb, its tense and whether or not it is contracted. It also considers the structure of the notional subject, most notably modification, the presence of quantifiers and..