The assessment of assimilation of a grammatical variant perceived by listeners with different extralinguistic backgrounds

The article presents experimental data on the problem of predicate-subject agreement in the XXI-st century English. Structures with either…or/neither…nor are analysed from the point of view of their perception by listeners and readers with different extralinguistic backgrounds. Some suggestions are made about the character of tendencies of variance of the predicate structure as well as its correlations with extralinguistic features, the degree of intensity of influence of the form of speech on the range of communicative acceptability of the grammatical variant.