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There is / are a total of twenty insects on the wall.
Which is the correct bold word?
Thanks.
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There are twenty insects. "Insects" is plural.
but
There is a total... "Total" is singular.
The prepositional phrase "of twenty insects" doesn't determine the verb.
So "There is a total of twenty insects," but it may sound awkward to you. (It doesn't to me - "There are a total" sounds awkward to me - but I tend to be a prescriptivist.) The way to handle awkwardness is to rephrase the sentence. There are many insects, in fact a total of twenty. That's less awkward, but more wordy. Sometimes that's the price of clarity.
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"There is a total of twenty insects," sounds good - but if you consider the whole sentence, including on the wall, the case is different for me. It's the insects that are crawling on the wall, not the abstract entity "total". So I would prefer the plural, as in "there are a lot of insects on the wall".
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Yes English is great if you don't equivocate.
Case and number must match.
Unless you make up your own rules.
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Yes English is great if you don't equivocate.
Case and number must match.
Unless you make up your own rules.
Which we do all the time. Make up our own rules, that is. Back in the day when we had case in English, the case of an adjective had to match the case of the noun it was modifying. Also the gender. And the number. And are you saying that the case must match the number?
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>>Case and number must match.
>And are you saying that the case must match the number?
sure looks like it.
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>>>Case and number must match.
>>And are you saying that the case must match the number?
>sure looks like it.
No accountings for tastes.
Last edited by Faldage; 07/13/13 11:51 AM.
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What would you say about the following example:
"There are a certain number of insects crawling on the wall" ? Here, the singular would sound very odd to me.
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What would you say about the following example:
"There are a certain number of insects crawling on the wall" ? Here, the singular would sound very odd to me. Ok, let's try this one: There is a certain number of insects crawling on the wall and that number is one. My point is that "case", meaning nouns or pronouns, must agree in number with singular or plurals verbs and in number with the objects of the verb. Simple huh?
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A) Using the phrase "a certain number" when that number is one is a pretty contrived example.
2) That's not a very standard definition of "case". Many linguists don't even admit that case exists in English outside of pronouns, but I don't know anyone who defines "case" as "nouns or pronouns".
Þ) When using such phrases as "a/the number of" or the like one must be very careful to determine whether one is talking about the number or the thing being numbered. "The number of insects on the wall has been increasing over the past few days" vs. "a number of insects have been crawling on the wall over the past few days.
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My point is that "case", meaning nouns or pronouns, must agree in number with singular or plurals verbs and in number with the objects of the verb. Simple huh?
Um, that's not what case is. Case is a grammatical category whereby the relationship of nouns to verbs is expressed by inflections (in IE languages suffixes). One kind of grammatical concord is the phenomenon whereby adjectives and nouns agree in case and number. Number is a grammatical category that applies to both nouns and verbs. Another kind of grammatical concord is agreement between the number of the noun or noun phrase that is the subject of a sentence and the verb.
Not all languages treat number in the same manner. In Classical Greek, a plural neuter noun as the subject of a sentence takes the singular form of the verb (in the third person). Feminine and masculine plural subject take the verb in the plural.
When Old English lost its case distinctions (a process that started before the Norman Conquest), it went from being a free-word-order language to one more fixed in its word order. There are remnants of case in the pronominal system in Present Day English.
Grammatical categories such as grammatical gender, number, case, tense, mood, etc., are anything but simple if one studies grammar seriously.
In phrases like "a number of X" or "a lot of Y", the copula in "there is/are" tends to agree with the number of the nouns X or Y. It's as though the fragments "a lot of" and "a number of" are being reanalyzed as quantifiers. With other phrases, the singular verb sounds better: e.g., "there is a cohort of freshmen sleeping in the dormitory hallway" or "there is a hovercraft full of eels outside".
[Edited to correct lapsus linguae.]
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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With other phrases, the plural verb sounds better: e.g., "there is a cohort of freshmen sleeping in the dormitory hallway" or "there is a hovercraft full of eels outside".
Yeh but... e.g., is it now is or are ( sorry if the question is dumb) Do I understand the e.g. wrong?
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Yeh but... e.g., is it now is or are ( sorry if the question is dumb) Do I understand the e.g. wrong?
Sorry BranShea, it was a mistake on my part: I meant singular not plural. (I have corrected it.)
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Yeh but... e.g., is it now is or are ( sorry if the question is dumb) Do I understand the e.g. wrong?
Sorry BranShea, it was a mistake on my part: I meant singular not plural. (I have corrected it.) Zee? If zmjezhd can make a mistake, zen there is hope for the rest of you. 
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Sure. I'm glad the e.g. was right else I would have been really confused. :-)
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