The communicative function of English verb number

Rule, pattern, and meaning in the second-language teaching of grammar

“…Going beyond the traditional treatment of "singular" and "plural" subjects and verbs with their rule of agreement, Reid (1991Reid ( , 2011, of the Columbia School of linguistics, 18 proposes that English has two semi-independent grammatical systems having to do with the semantic domain of Number. Each system is made up of forms that signal meaning.…”

“…See Contini-Morava (2011) andReid (2011) for a critique of that view of the nature of syntax, such as is represented by other papers in that volume.4 While it might appear that the UG-type exceptionless formal rule is a straw man, and that the existence of many exceptions is widely recognized in SLA, the situation is actually more dire: a disagreement between two views of the fundamental nature of grammar: one in which the basis consists of formal correspondences that are essentially autonomous of meaning (a rule), with exceptions that are motivated by or explained by meaning, versus one in which grammar is thoroughly meaningful, across the board. The view that one holds -whether consciously or not -will affect not only how one talks about language but how one approaches teaching it(Larsen-Freeman 2003).…”

"Agreement" as a perspectivizing device in discourse

“…As for Reid (2011), his article argues for an account of "noun" and "verb" number in English present tense clauses, in terms of the separate assignment of the contrasting conceptual properties "ONE" marked by singular inflections (- for nouns, and -S for verbs), and "MORE THAN ONE" marked by plural ones (-S for nouns, and - for verbs). However, the semantic substances to which these two meanings apply are different.…”

“…2 except for the fact that here, unlike in examples (8) and (9a), there is in fact no choice between syntactic and semantic "agreement" in (9b). See Reid (2011Reid ( :1109, reproduced in note 15) for an analogous English pair of examples involving the singular-marked noun number as head of a complex subject NP with a plural noun as part of its complement, where the present-tense verb conforms in number to the head noun ((32a)) or to the complement noun ((32b)), thereby inducing a distinct type of interpretation of the subject NP as a whole in each case. 15…”

“…those having to do with topic or focus status as well as speaker reference (thus involving the Interpersonal level within an FDG, indicating what the speaker is presupposing to be currently active in the addressee's mind at the time of utterance: cf. the "entity in focus" in Reid's (2011) account of English noun and verb number); those involving knowledge of the world (the Conceptual component) and of the conventions regulating communication as well as the immediate co-text and discourse constructed upstream of the incoming utterance (the purview of the Contextual component, specifying the intended reference, and how the referent is being conceptualiseda conceptualisation which may well evolve, as we have seen); those bearing on the particular function-argument relation in terms of which the agreement occurs (thus involving the Representational level, which should establish what is being predicated of the intended referentcrucial for determining which of a possible number of potential referents is in fact having something predicated of it); and finally, those concerning the nature of the grammatical relation which it expresses (the Morphosyntactic, encoding level).…”