Look at this lead sentence of a 2015 news agency report: “Falling oil prices have hurt the economies of Gulf countries.” In answer to an India-based Forum member’s question in August of that year, I described the subject of that sentence as both notionally and grammatically plural. That subject was, of course, the plural-form noun phrase “falling oil prices,” and I made that observation to explain why the plural present-perfect verb form “have hurt” was correctly used to ensure subject-verb agreement in that sentence.
A few days later, another Forum member—this time a Filipino based in the Philippines—asked me precisely what I meant by “notionally” when I said that the subject of the sentence “Falling oil prices have hurt the economies of Gulf countries” is plural both grammatically and notionally.
I explained that I used the word “notionally” in the sense that the intended meaning of that noun phrase is the thought that it represents rather than what appears to be its syntactic function in a sentence. The ideal situation in English sentence construction is, of course, that there is both notional agreement and grammatical agreement between the subject and the operative verb. Then it becomes simplicity itself to apply the subject-verb agreement rule—match a plural subject with the operative verb in its plural form. Clearly, this was the case in the sentence “Falling oil prices have hurt the economies of Gulf countries.”
In English, however, we will encounter not just a few situations when the subject-verb agreement rule couldn’t be easily and confidently applied owing to a clear conflict between notion and grammar in the sentence that’s under construction. A classic example is how to deal with sentences that have as subject the indefinite pronouns “everybody” or “everyone.” Both are evidently grammatically singular in form, but they are actually notionally plural in the same sense as the plural pronoun “all.”
So then which form of the verb should we use in these two notion-grammar conflicted sentences: “
Everybody (has, have) a good word about him” and “
Everyone (has, have) misgivings about her candidacy”?
A strong argument can be made that with the indefinite pronouns “everybody” and “everyone,” notional agreement should take precedence over grammatical agreement, meaning that the plural “have” should be the logical choice in both sentences. What has evolved as the standard usage in English, however, is that verbs in such cases should agree in number with the grammatically singular form of “everybody” and “everyone” and not with their plural meaning: “
Everybody has a good word about him.” “
Everyone has misgivings about her candidacy.”
However, there are a number of notion-grammar conflicted usages where notional agreement prevails over grammatical agreement. For one, although the “the number of” is considered singular in American English, as in “
The number of refugees flocking to Europe
is now in the tens of thousands,” the phrase “a number of” is considered notionally plural, as in “
A number of fruit drinks have run out of stock in that grocery store.” The same thing applies to the phrases “the total” and “a total of”—the first is grammatically singular, as in the sentence “
The total is diminishing even as I speak,” but the second is notionally plural, as in the sentence “
A total of 246 employees have been laid off in the beleaguered company.”
Finally, we have the case of the pronoun “none.” It is grammatically singular and also notionally singular if it refers to “not one” or to “no part,” as in “
None of the applicants interviewed yesterday
was hired.” However, “none” is grammatically plural and notionally plural as well if it refers to “not any,” as in “
None of the bureaucrats running for public office
are expected to pass our club’s integrity check.”
(Next:
Aspiring writer in a storm-ravaged town appeals for help) November 26, 2020
This essay, 2,020th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the November 19, 2020 Internet edition of The Manila Times
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