Analyze the advanced syntactic structure, correlative conjunction governance, and proximity rule in the following complex sentence:"Neither the principal nor the members of the faculty was willing to compromise on the revised academic curriculum."Identify whether the underlined verb requires grammatical modification according to standard English syntax.

Detailed Explanation

According to the rules of Subject-Verb Agreement, when two subjects are joined by correlative conjunctions such as 'either... or' or 'neither... nor', the verb agrees with the subject that is closer to it (known as the proximity rule or the rule of proximity). In this sentence, the plural noun phrase 'members of the faculty' is positioned closer to the verb than the singular noun 'principal'. Therefore, the singular verb 'was' is incorrect and must be modified to the plural verb 'were' to maintain standard syntactic concordance.

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