Author Topic: Should the quantifier “a lot” be taken as singular or plural?  (Read 2863 times)

Joe Carillo

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Should the quantifier “a lot” be taken as singular or plural?

I would like to share this brief exchange of tweets between Catherine @cath980 and me on Twitter recently (April 4, 2015):

Jose A. Carillo ‏@J8Carillo:
#Grammar conundrum: “There (are, is) more than one way to skin a cat.”* Correct answer gives you an A+ for grammar. http://tinyurl.com/pzxo2ps

(She didn’t answer the question but asked a related question instead.)

Catherine ‏@cath980:
What is the rule for “a lot”? “There is/are a lot of clowns in that car.”

‏@J8Carillo:
It’s notionally plural, grammatically plural when it refers to a plural count noun: “There are a lot of clowns in that car.” As stand-alone, it’s grammatically singular: “There is a lot in that car,” meaning “a considerable number,” singular.

‏@cath980:
Thank you, I thought so! Many people use the singular only, so I started to wonder.

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*For my answer to this grammar conundrum and my justification for it, click this link to my 2005 essay, “An English-language conundrum,” that I posted in the Forum on November 13, 2009. The question was posed to me by my cyberspace friend Niels Hovmöller, a knowledgeable Swedish secondary school English teacher (retired) and educational software developer.

What was the Tree of Knowledge in Eden most likely to have been?

I had this brief exchange with Hilario F. Tamor Jr. on Facebook recently (March 25, 2015):

My posting on Facebook:
Genesis Quiz: With its huge database, the Tree of Knowledge in Eden was most likely: (a) an apple tree, (b) a banana tree, (c) magic fungi, (d) a state-of-the-art computer. I explain why. “The Tree of Life”

Hilario F. Tamor Jr.: Banana is a plant and not a tree.

Me: You’re right, for botanically speaking “banana” is actually an herb. However, I used the word “banana” not to denote the fruit but to denote a “tree” in the dictionary sense of “something in the form of or resembling a tree.” I trust you’ll agree that it absolves me from the sin of wrong word usage.

Hilario: All is well that ends well.
« Last Edit: April 04, 2015, 11:33:13 AM by Joe Carillo »