Post History
Many quantity words trigger agreement with their object rather than themselves. For instance, syntactically, "a lot, "a bunch", "an amount" seem to all be singular. However, as a native speaker, "T...
#3: Nominated for promotion
by
Moshi
·
2022-12-28T05:27:41Z (almost 2 years ago)
#2: Nominated for promotion
by
Moshi
·
2022-10-26T21:14:23Z (about 2 years ago)
#1: Initial revision
by
Moshi
·
2022-10-18T03:42:40Z (about 2 years ago)
Plural agreement with a syntactically singular subject
Many quantity words trigger agreement with their object rather than themselves. For instance, syntactically, "**a** lot, "**a** bunch", "**an** amount" seem to all be singular. However, as a native speaker, "There *are* a lot of people", with the plural form of the verb "are", seems just as grammatical as "There *is* a lot of people". I am curious about how and when these "singular but plural" constructions came to be, and how they can be analyzed. From intuition, I would hazard a guess that "a lot of", "a bunch of" etc. used to be simple measurements in the same way we would say "a pound of" (though "a pound of" still takes singular agreement in modern English) and later became lexicalized, but this is merely my own conjecture.