| Sumario: | Subject-verb agreement in contemporary English has always been regarded as an operation morphologically marked, especially through the bound morpheme -s on the verb/auxiliary.3SG1 in the present tense. However, that agreement is not marked neither on the verb/auxiliary.3SG in the past tense nor on modal auxiliaries. It is worth noting that this is surprising for a language where subject-verb agreement is viewed as morphologically visible. Things are supposed to be so due to the poverty of the English inflectional morphology (Cf. Roberts, 1985; Pollock, 1989; Chomsky, 1991; 1993; Fernández-Pena, 2014; 2017; inter alia). Thus, since subject-verb agreement in contemporary English is said to be visible only through the occurrence of the bound morpheme -s on the verb/auxiliary.3SG in the present tense, this morpheme is consequently taken as the symbol of subject-verb agreement markedness (Cf. Kayne, 1989; 1994). And yet, when considering some non-assertive constructions and sentences having a collective noun as grammatical subject, there are reasons to postulate that subject-verb agreement in contemporary English is not morphologically marked. This paper is then intended to show that subject-verb agreement in contemporary English is not morphologically marked, that the bound morpheme realized on the verb/auxiliary.3SG in the present tense appears to be the realization of a pragmatic/discursive feature, and that this morphemic realization is triggered by legibility conditions as proposed by the Strong Minimalist Thesis (Chomsky, 1995).
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