| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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1. Grammar: Traditional Rules, Word Order, Agreement, and Case
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| § 60. subject and verb agreement |
| This entry provides an overview of subject and verb agreement. Problems that pertain to specific nouns, such as data, number, and politics, are treated at these entries under Word Choice. Other kinds of problems, such as those involving indefinite adjectives (like every) or conjunctions (like either), are treated at their respective entries in this chapter. | 1 |
| grammatical agreement. A verb must agree with its subject in person and number. Singular subjects take singular verbs, and plural subjects take plural verbs. We’ve all heard this lesson more times than we care to remember. It’s a good lesson, to be sure, but it’s not quite as simple as it sounds. | 2 |
| One of the nice things about English is that its verbs do not change much to agree with a subject in number. In fact, for almost all verbs, there is only one change, adding -s or -es for third person singular, present tense. We say He goes, She tries, and It matters. All other persons require no changes to the verb. We say I play, You play, We play, and They play. The past tense requires its own changes to the verb, but (except for the verb be) these do not involve number. Thus we say He walked and I ran, They walked and we ran, and so on. | 3 |
| The modal auxiliaries are an exception to the agreement rule. They do not change to show number. We say I can swim, He can swim, They can swim, and so on. The primary verb be is a unique case in that it has many different forms—am, are, is, was, were—depending on the person, number, and tense of a specific use. | 4 |
| notional agreement. It would be great if this was all there was to remember, but there is more than one kind of agreement. There is grammatical agreement, as discussed above, and agreement in meaning, or notional agreement. Usually grammatical agreement and notional agreement coincide. In the sentence He laughs, both are singular. In the sentence We laugh, both are plural. But in some sentences a subject can have a singular form and a plural meaning. Thus in the sentence Her family are all avid skiers, the noun family is singular in form but plural in meaning, and the verb is plural to agree with the meaning. In other words, there is notional agreement, but not grammatical agreement, between the subject and the verb. In the sentence Everyone has gone to the movies, the situation is reversed. The subject everyone is plural in meaning and singular in form, but the verb agrees in number with the form of its grammatical subject. There is grammatical agreement but not notional agreement. | 5 |
| Similarly, there are some nouns like mumps and news that are plural in form but take a singular verb: The mumps was once a common childhood disease. Amounts often take a singular verb: Ten thousand bucks is a lot of money. Here again we have notional, but not grammatical, agreement—the ten thousand bucks is considered a single quantity, and it gets a singular verb. | 6 |
| There are a number of words in English that can take a singular or plural verb depending on how they are used. Among these are collective nouns, pronouns such as any and none, and many nouns ending in -ics, such as politics. | 7 |
| agreement by proximity. Certain grammatical constructions provide further complications. Sometimes the noun that is adjacent to the verb can exert more influence than the noun that is the grammatical subject. Selecting a verb in a sentence like A variety of styles has been/have been in vogue for the last year can be tricky. The traditional rules require has been, but the plural sense of the noun phrase presses for have been. While 59 percent of the Usage Panel insists on the singular verb in this sentence, 22 percent actually prefer the plural verb and another 19 percent say that either has or have is acceptable, meaning that 41 percent find the plural verb with a singular grammatical subject to be acceptable. | 8 |
| Sometimes syntax itself makes it impossible to follow the agreement rule. In a sentence like Either John or his brothers are bringing the dessert, the verb can’t agree with both parts of the subject. Some people believe that the verb should agree with the closer of the two subjects. This is called agreement by proximity. For more on this subject, see
either and
or. | 9 |
| compound subjects. In Modern English, a compound subject connected by and normally takes a plural verb: Rebecca and Martha play in the same band. The house and the barn are on the same property. Their innovative idea, persistence, and careful research have finally paid off. When a subject is followed by a conjoining prepositional phrase such as as well as, in addition to, or with, the verb should be singular: Jesse as well as Luke likes jazz. The old school along with the playground is up for sale. | 10 |
| Sometimes compound subjects are governed by a sense of unity and by notional agreement take a singular verb: My name and address is printed on the box. His colleague and friend (one person) deserves equal credit. This sense of unity is not simply a stylistic flourish. Using a singular or plural verb changes the meaning of the sentence. Eating garlic and drinking red wine sometimes gives me a headache means that the combination of garlic and red wine can cause a headache. With a plural verb (give), the sentence implies that garlic and red wine act separately; either can bring a headache. | 11 |
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| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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