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English Language
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Analyze the advanced syntactic structure, distributive quantifiers, and collective agreement in the following complex sentence:"Neither of the highly anticipated economic treatises written by the Nobel laureate were published in time for the international monetary symposium."Identify whether the underlined verb requires grammatical modification according to standard English syntax.
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Detailed Explanation
According to standard rules of English syntax regarding Wikipedia Reference, distributive pronouns such as 'each', 'either', and 'neither' are strictly singular when they function as the head of the subject phrase (e.g., 'Neither of the treatises...'). Although a plural noun or pronoun follows the preposition 'of', the true grammatical head of the subject is the singular pronoun 'Neither'. Therefore, the verb must be singular ('was' instead of 'were'). Proximity agreement (attraction) is considered non-standard in formal edited English.
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