The Issue is S-V 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.

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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:

Here’s a headline from the local paper:

Shouldn’t that be “has been identified”?

No! The subject of the sentence is “all,” which is a plural when you’re counting something. (It can be singular when you’re measuring. “All of my pudding is gone.”)

Well, “one body recovered from Downard Funeral Home” is rather long, giving you time to forget the actual subject, and to want to make the verb agree with “body.” (This is called attraction, by the way.)

So be alert!

English has a fairly common error when someone makes the number (singular or plural) of a verb agree with the closest noun even when the verb doesn’t refer to that noun. This is called attraction. You can do this in Latin, I’m told, but not in English.

Here’s an example of incorrectly avoiding the habit of attraction:

Smart grids are a management system that use a combination of sensors and AI to distribute and conserve energy. 

https://www.morningbrew.com/emerging-tech for September 3, 2021

“Grids” is plural (hence “grids are”), and “use” is plural, but “use” doesn’t refer to “grids”! “Use” applies to “system,” which is singular. It should be “…system that uses…”

So this writer, normally alert enough to avoid this error of attraction, overdid their caution! So be alert, not just cautious.