It is shown that when the subject complement in a copulative clause is a noun phrase, there is not always subject-subject complement number concord. In such cases, sometimes the verb agrees in number with the complement, rather than with the subject – in other words, the choice of the verb number is dictated by the subject complement rather than by the subject. It is then argued that a construction having only subject complement-verb concord is derived by transformation from one in which there is only subject-verb concord and that the subject-verb concord can be considered as remaining intact in the derived construction if the conventional labelling of its constituents is revised.
