Agreement & coordinate non-DP subjects

Louis’s current project is looking at patterns of English verb agreement, specifically in sentences with non-DP subjects. These are sentences such as “Under the bed is a good place to hide” and “That James left early upset me” where the subject is presumably the PP in the former and the CP in the latter. His interests lie in what happens to the verb when these non-DP subjects are coordinated: “under the bed and behind the curtains”. The existing literature on this topic identifies a notion of the conjoined elements shared ‘semantic compatibility’ as contributing to an alternation between singular and plural verb forms. His research is investigating the contribution of both these supposed semantic effects and potential non-semantic effects.