Re: Is or Are

"Peter Groves" <whatever@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:c18bl.10740$cu.10715@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"There is an endless number of prime factor graphs that have the same
underlying graph."

Should it be "There is" or "there are"?

When the subject is singular, use a singular form of the verb.

I'm not sure it's quite that straightforward. What agrees with the verb is
the head of the noun phrase that forms the subject, and while in "the
number
of elephants is increasing" the head is clearly "number", if the subject
is
"a number of elephants", on the other hand, while the grammatical head is
still technically "number" the semantic head is "elephants", with "a
number
of" functioning as a kind of determiner, like "some". For this reason I
would be much more likely to say "the number of elephants in the garden is
increasing" but "a number of elephants are in the garden" or "a small
number
of men were there".

This argument seems to be that semantic doctrine permits
overriding the rules of grammar. If so, it seems an obsolete argument.

We proceed ultimately from usage. Our rules of grammar are
patterns repeated so nearly universally (and without exception)
that we certify those patterns as "rules" as if a priori, even while
we admit they are generalizations from use (a posteriori.) There
seems no basis for an equivalent set of syntactic rules. Even
if there were such a set, our accepted foundation for it would
not permit symantic rules to override rules of grammar.

We do not need such a meta-rule. Some common speech does
indeed contravene prior rules of grammar, hinting that those
rules may change in future.

--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)
equivalent basis to cite


.

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