Prescriptive English Grammar.

Subject-verb agreement with conjoined singular nouns.

Published on October 7, 2005 By Jamie Burnside In Misc

I ran into this sentence today:

there is a green car and a motorcycle on harriet street

Students are supposed to read it, and then correct it for errors.

The correct answer is: There are a green car and a motorcycle on Harriet Street.

In prescriptive grammar, this compound subject (two singular nouns linked by "and") requires a third-person plural to-be verb in order to maintain subject-verb agreement.

Most native English speakers would apply the "proximity principle", whereby the verb is conjugated according to the noun nearest the verb in the sentence.

Native speakers would say:

There is a green car and a motorcycle...
There are two green cars and a motorcycle...
There is a green car and two motorcycles...

But of course the native speaker would be technically wrong using all but the second of the above sentences.

It is interesting how often prescriptive grammar rules are broken by conversational English. Problem sentences like the one above don't compute. Reading and/or teaching, "There are a green car and a motorcycle on Harriet Street." creates disonance in my head-computer. I think I will strike that sentence from today's lesson (or at least make it optional-only...)

Comments

Leauki

on Oct 07, 2005

Well, yes and no.

Prescriptive grammar is often not the correct grammar opposite popular grammar but the Latin grammar opposite Germanic/English grammar. In this case Latin prescriptive and popular Germanic grammar agree, however, that the finite form taken by the verb must be the plural.

BUT

I don't think there is a proximity principle involved in this case. What happens is that the speaker assumes, in the absence of the second part of the sentence which might be a current observation, that "there" is the subject of the sentence.

Consider "Mary is a cow and a monkey". Clearly Mary is the subject, and even though cow and monkey are nominative, they are not subject of the sentence and thus have no influence on the finite verb form: "Mary are a cow and a monkey" is wrong.

Similarly the word "there", although not a noun, could be perceived as a subject because the real subjects of the sentence could be perceived as descriptions of that subject.

In German the same sentence "Dort ist ein gruenes Auto und ein Motorrad in Harriet-Strasse." is wrong (and sounds wrong), whereas (ignoring the fact that the entire sentence structure sounds funny in German) "Dort sind ein gruenes Auto und ein Motorrad." is correct (and sounds correct). "ist" is singular, "sind" is plural.

Now, I quickly skipped over the really important part here. Have you noticed it? I gave a hint.

The important part is that whatever it is that is "there", the speaker might not know how many of them there are when he starts the sentence.

Thus the grammatically wrong "there is" becomes easier to say and easier to follow, and since it fits so neatly as a verb for "there", the sentence with "there is" sounds more correct.

What do we learn? There is many ways to accidentally butcher a language, but there are also too many a rule in grammar. But this should not stop we noble smart people, should it?

Jamie Burnside

on Oct 07, 2005

Thus the grammatically wrong "there is" becomes easier to say and easier to follow, and since it fits so neatly as a verb for "there", the sentence with "there is" sounds more correct.

That reads like proximity principle to me.

Leauki

on Oct 07, 2005

"That reads like proximity principle to me."

No, the nearest noun is not what defines the verb form according to my explanation.

Nancy

on Oct 11, 2005

I LOVE this post! I think you are absolutely right on. A native speaker from the USA would use the proximity principle. It doesn't sound right to say "are" to me.

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