| 词组 | agreement, subject-verb: a bunch of the boys |
| 释义 | agreement, subject-verb: a bunch of the boys • A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon —Robert W. Service, "The Shooting of Dan McGrew," 1907 The usage question is this: should the verb be were or was whooping it up? The answer, say the experts (Kil-patrick in Pittsburgh Press, 11 Aug. 1985, Jacques Bar-zun in Safire 1982, Winners & Sinners, 5 Aug. 1983), is were. Why? There are several reasons. First, we can see two of the three forces that chiefly determine agreement—proximity and notional agreement—pulling in the direction of the plural. Second, we have the plain sense of the subject-verb relation: the boys whoop, not the bunch. And if boys is the real subject of the sentence, then the phrase a bunch of is functioning essentially as a modifier—it is, in fact, very similar to what many modern grammarians call a predeterminer. Here are a few more examples: • A rash of stories in the Chicago media have reported —cited by James J. Kilpatrick, Pittsburgh Press Sunday Mag., 11 Aug. 1985 • Yet the flock of acolytes surrounding each jefe are not expected to justify their servility —Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans, 1985 • A crew of Pyrates are driven —Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, 1726 (in McKnight 1928) • A set of writers have lately sprung up in England — Columbia Mag., March 1787 (in Shopen & Williams 1980) • ... a host of people who are interested in language —Charlton Laird, Foreword to Finegan 1980 • A trio of génies are —Bryant Gumble, cited from a television broadcast in Counterforce, June 1983 • ... a class of sentences which are superficially parallel —Brian Joseph, Language, June 1980 • Thus, only a fraction of such deposits are actually insured —Consumer Reports, January 1983 • Moreover, the preponderance of users view transparency as blue-sky technology —Eugene Lowen-thal, Datamation, August 1982 Though experts and common sense agree that the plural verb is natural and correct, actual usage still shows a few holdouts for the singular verb. Except for the first— Lindley Murray perhaps was too conscious of the grammatical subject—the examples below may be the result of nervous copy editors or indecision on the part of the writers: • ... many errors have been committed: a number of which is subjoined, as a further caution —Lindley Murray 1795 (but the errors are subjoined, not a number) • ... a set of numbered rods, developed by John Napier, which was used for calculating —Ellen Rich-man, Spotlight on Computer Literacy, 1982 • ... a neat, little package of words that describes Bird's play —Gerry Finn, Morning Union (Springfield, Mass.), 29 Jan. 1985 (but the words describe, not the package) • ... are run through a set of computer algorithms that rearranges them —The Economist, 17 May 1986 (the algorithms rearrange) When you have a collecting noun phrase (a bunch of) before a plural noun (the boys), the sense will normally be plural and so should the verb. See also number 1; one of those who. |
| 随便看 |
英语用法大全包含2888条英语用法指南，基本涵盖了全部常用英文词汇及语法点的翻译及用法，是英语学习的有利工具。