| 词组 | agreement, subject-verb: miscellaneous problems |
| 释义 | agreement, subject-verb: miscellaneous problems 1. Titles. Curme 1931 notes that titles of written works are treated as singular even if the title is plural. Our evidence generally confirms this: • ... Shakespeare's Sonnets has remained the exception —A. Kent Hieatt, PMLA, October 1983 Pronoun reference, however, may be plural in notional agreement: • I have been reading the Lives of the Poets for thirty years, and can testify that in all that time I have never known the day or the hour when I failed to find interest, instruction, amusement, somewhere in their pages —John Wain, Samuel Johnson, 1974 2. Amounts of money, periods of time, etc. "The principle of notional concord accounts for the common use of a singular with subjects that are plural noun phrases of quantity or measure. The entity expressed by the noun phrase is viewed as a single unit... ," says Quirk et al. 1985. Quirk appends such examples as • Ten dollars is all I have left. • Two miles is as far as they can walk. • Two thirds of the area is under water. Quirk's observations are consistent with the evidence in Curme 1931. Much earlier Fitzedward Hall, in an article excoriating William Cullen Bryant (published in 1880 and reprinted in Bolton & Crystal 1969), had taken time in a footnote to prefer Bryant's "Eight dollars a month is the common rate" to T. B. Macaulay's "Four shillings a week, therefore, were... fair agricultural wages." Hall notes that Macaulay was not consistent—he also used the singular verb: "The ambassador told his master that six thousand guineas was the smallest gratification that could be offered to so important a minister." Copperud 1970, 1980 also recommends the singular verb. 3. Subject and complement of different number. People are often uncertain about the number of a linking verb in sentences like "Potatoes are a vegetable." The uncertainty lies, says Curme 1931, in the uncertainty a copula (linking verb) creates about whether the noun before or the noun after is the true subject. Curme goes on to say, "The present tendency is to avoid a decision on this perplexing point by regulating the number of the copula by a mere formal principle—namely, as the nominative before the copula is often the subject, it has become the rule to place the copula in accord with it, whether it be a subject or a predicate." Copperud 1970,1980 cites several of his sources as agreeing to what Curme observes to have become customary—to treat the first noun as the subject. The custom seems not to have changed over the last 50 years and more: the noun before the verb governs it. |
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