🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Jul22.022640.23790@leland.Stanford.EDU> alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson) writes:
>In article <1992Jul21.190619.21438@alf.uib.no>, hlirg@alf (Roger Greenwald) writes:
>>A worse one is that the New York Times usually contains at least a few
>>sentences every day in which the verb does not agree with the subject in
>>number.  The most common case is that of sentences that begin with "There is"
>>or "there was," and then follow up with a list of items, each of which is
>>singular. (There is anger and frustration in Sarajevo tonight.) But there are
>>many other cases as well.
>
>It may be regrettable, but it is also a wide-spread dialect phenomenon.
>Further, the items need not be singular in the list:
>
>	There's cats and dogs and Hallowe'en spooks in the yard!
>
>For a number of speakers of English, this is perfectly grammatical, although it
>may conflict with the usual standards.

Well, even people who are careful writers SAY a great many things
that they wouldn't write (part of what makes talking fun). The New
York Times would like to imagine it represents a more careful
standard of written English than many other publications, so I
don't think the paper itself would justify errors of agreement
on the grounds that they do occur in some dialects.

>
>>You can say the writers can't count from one to two; or you can say that the
>>plural form of "to be" is gradually disappearing from English. The latter is a
>>linguist's type of description. In this case it's probably correct, even if it
>>may be regrettable.
>
>I don't think it is a case of the plural forms disappearing in other than a
>particular context which is syntcatically determined.
>-- 

As I said, sentences that begin with  "There is", "There's", etc.
are not the only cases. I'm sorry I don't have my clippings here
to quote. But in addition to finding "There is anger and frustration
in Sarajevo tonight," you will also find, for example, "The anger
and frustration here in Sarajevo tonight is palpable." Annie Dillard,
a careful writer, writes the following in LIVING BY FICTION (1982):
"All this drama and action appeals to practically everybody" (p. 46);
"If we complain..., these critics can reply that all mental effort
and verbal artifact is artificial, playful, ingenious, and irresponsible"
(p. 129). She would seem to think that "all" changes the number.
I could cite many other cases. Perhaps it is true that if one studied
enough of them, one could come up with rules describing the syntactical
conditions under which singular verbs are tolerated with plural subjects
and vice versa, and the conditions under which traditional agreement is
still observed. But that would not change the fact that the tolerance
of lack of agreement is now greater than it was, say, 20 years ago
in equivalent written documents.
-- 
Roger Greenwald
Greenwald@hf.uib.no (address valid only until 10 August 1992)