Singular or Plural?

Some collective nouns can be singular or plural depending on the context. Here’s an example:

But only about 10 percent of the deaths and casualties in a hurricane are caused by wind itself. The vast majority of damage and casualties are caused by flooding and storm surge flooding, river flooding, excessive precipitation, as well as the wind pushing those waters on shore.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13042024/meteorologists-predict-2024-hurricane-season/

“10 percent” is a plural, so no problem with “are caused” in that sentence. But look at the next one. The subject is “majority,” a singular collective noun. (“of damage and casualties” is the object of a preposition, so it doesn’t count.) Therefore, the verb should be singular, “is caused.”

This tendency to set singular or plural based on what’s closest regardless of its connection is called attraction. It’s legal in Latin, but not in English.

Here’s a picture that appeared with the article:

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

Third panel. Whose life? Children! A plural! So the sentence should say “their lives” even though they no doubt do the risking one at a time.

Using “their” ought to strengthen the plural agreement.

Or maybe disagreement. In English we have sepaate verb forms for connection with singular or plural nouns. Plural verb goes with plural nouns, singular with singular. First panel:

The verb is “comes,” which is the singular form. but we have two girls, clearly a plural. Wrong verb. I kind of apologize to our non-English-speaking friends that we use -s for the singular third person verb form and -s for the plurals of nouns.

Here’s the sentence. Think about the highlighted verbs before you read what’s below.

Okay, “accompanies” and “means” are singular verbs. What might be their subject or subjects?

“Accompanies” is close to “reports, studies, and press releases,” but that’s a plural! So “blizzard,” a singular, has to be the subject. The blizzard accompanies a COP.

What about “means”? Looks like “blizzard has to be its subject, too. So the blizzard accompanies and means something. Awkward, but technically it could be grammatical.

But what about that nice list? You could say that they accompany a COP, especially since they’re objects of a preposition with a relative clause right after it.

I think if the list did the accompanying and the blizzard should mean something gets buried; after all, it’s a blizzard!

What’s your opinion?

The previous post shows a local newspaper getting a tricky construction correct. Here’s a simpler version of the same trickiness, and the scientist got it wrong! (Well, okay, our scientist here might be an (ahem) professional journalist writing a science article.)

“Each” is a singular, and the sentence has only three words between the subject and the verb, so the verb should be singular. But you know that, right?

Here’s a picture of one of the balls: