So, under which issue does "there are a lot" fall?
There's a problem with this? Presumably, the sentence goes on from there, e.g., "there are a lot of dingie-hoozies ..." If you're talking about the lot then, yeah, it should be "there is a lot ..." but if you're talking about the dingie-hoozies "there are a lot ..." is surely correct.
I guess I'm really stupid, then, and need this explained to me. I don't understand how "there are a lot of dingie-hoozies" is correct, but "there are a group of dingie-hoozies" is wrong, unless, of course, it is correct. The following are all correct, then, although they sound wrong to me:
There are a box of dingie-hoozies.
There are a roomful of dingie-hoozies.
There are a crapload of dingie-hoozies.
There are a quantity of dingie-hoozies.
OK. If by "a lot" you mean, say, seven or more, then it's the dingie-hoozies you're talking about and they're plural. If there is a lot of dingie-hoozies in amongst the Rodin sculptures, Monet paintings, and stuffed fantods up for auction at Sotheby's then it is a single unit and it would be "there is a lot of dingie-hoozies."
My ear tells me, in your examples:
*There are a box of dingie-hoozies.
In this case it is the box that we're talking about and it happens to contain dingie-hoozies. That's just my ear, mind.
?There are a roomful of dingie-hoozies.
This one is a little more questionable. My ear hears "There is a roomful ...". I think it's a matter of "box" and "roomful" not being really number-type terms.
There are a crapload of dingie-hoozies.
I think this one could go either way. It's complicated by the fact that "there's" is becoming the default construction whether the complement is singular or plural. This is partly because it's easier to say "there's" than it is to say "there're" and partly because there seems to be a tendency for this syntactic construction to be singular, at least in Indo-European languages. Compare German
es gibt, Spanish
hay¹, and French
il-y-a².
This whole argument also holds for your last example:
There are a quantity of dingie-hoozies.
1. As I remember, the Spanish
hay derives from the 3rd person singular
ha of the verb
haber, 'to have'. I forget where the
y comes from.
2. In retrospect, I'm thinking that the question about the 'there is/there are' rule might boil down to concern about this drift in present day English.
PS
To Jackie.
Dingle-hoozies are fantods with the stuffing taken out of them.
Edit: To twosleepy:
Nothing stupid about it. English grammar is not a simple concept and some aspects are fairly controversial. See Pullum and Huddleston,
Cambridge Grammar of the English Language on the subject of prepositions. They make, IMNSHO, a hoorah's nest out of the definition of prepositions. Somewhere I have a link to, I think it's Google Books's link to the appropriate section of CGEL with their definition of
preposition. Right now, I don't have the time to find it.
