Another Question about Subject-Verb Agreement

[Justine A.]

Sir, may I know the reason why the following sentences do not follow the subject-verb agreement rule:

"Convinced by nun's story,  the AMRPS wrote Oliveros demand that he apologize to traumatized nun."

" I cannot have everybody agree on what I do but I can tell I did it in accordance with my conscience."

[Joe Carillo]

Sorry for this relayed reply, Justine. I overlooked this posting of yours.

The first sentence, "Convinced by (the) nun's story, the AMRPS wrote Oliveros demand that he apologize to traumatized nun," doesn't have a subject-disagreement problem. It only seems to have that problem because of a grammatical error in phrasing. It would actually be a correct sentence in the subjunctive mood if phrased in either of these two ways:

1. Subjunctive using the the infinitive phrase "to demand..." as direct object of the verb "wrote":: "Convinced by (the) nun's story, the AMRPS wrote Oliveros to demand that he apologize to traumatized nun."

2. Subjunctive using the the gerund phrase "demanding that..." as direct object of the verb "wrote": "Convinced by (the) nun's story, the AMRPS wrote Oliveros demanding that he apologize to traumatized nun."

As to the second sentence, I find no problem with it nor see any subject-verb disagreement in its structure.

For an exhaustive discussion of the subjunctive mood, including the seemingly wrong usage of the "that he apologize" form instead of "that he apologizes," review my four-part posting on "Some recurrent misuses of the English subjunctive."

[Justine A.]

I just read this post in Facebook: "When everything seems wrong, look and be with nature's perfect GOD creations to make everything feels right." Here, the use of the linking verb "feels" must be in singular form to construct correct subjunctive sentence. Right sir?

Is "demanding that" in second subjunctive sentence presented is infinitive phrase, not gerund phrase?

[Joe Carillo]

Sorry, Justine, it must be due to the oppressive heat in my room at mid-morning today (the aircon was just starting up, you see). In Item 2 of my response to you, the statement "Subjunctive using the infinitive phrase 'to demand that...' as direct object of the verb 'wrote'" should have correctly read "Subjunctive using the gerund phrase 'demanding that...' as direct object of the verb 'wrote'." I copy-pasted the statement from Item 1 but overlooked changing "infinitive phrase" to "gerund phrase." My apologies. (I am correcting the post right after this to avoid confusing others.)

Now as to this post that you came across in Facebook: "When everything seems wrong, look and be with nature's perfect GOD creations to make everything feels right." You got the wrong impression that the use of the linking verb "feels" is in the singular form because the sentence is in the subjunctive form. Actually, the verb "feels" is not a linking verb in that construction, and nor is the sentence where it appears in the subjective mood. In fact, "feels" should be corrected to "feel" but not for subject-verb agreement but for an entirely different purpose.

In the corrected verb phrase "to make everything feel right," the verb form "make" is what's known as a causative verb, which is a special kind of verb that carries out an action that causes another action, state, or condition to happen. Specifically in this case, "make" is the causative verb that causes the condition "feel right" to happen.

For a much better understanding of how causative verbs work, check out the two essays that I have posted in the Forum, "Using causative and factitive verbs," and "How the causatives enable intransitive verbs to overcome their intransitivity." I'm sure that those two essays will throw an entirely new light to some strange grammatical constructions that must have intrigued you in your readings.