News..has

News of radiation leaks from one of Japan's nuclear plants have sparked off concerns among many netizens in Singapore.

There's a mistake in that sentence (read full story here). Can you spot it?

The mistake arises from subject-verb concord. This rule relates to number agreement between the subject and the verb that follows it:

(1) My cat sleeps all night
(2) My cats sleep all night.

In (1), the singular subject My cat agrees in number with the singular verb sleeps. In (2), the plural subject My cats agrees in number with the plural verb sleep.

It's trivial when the subject is a simple noun phrase. In (1) above, my cat is a noun phrase made up of the determiner my and the head noun cat.

It gets a bit tricky when you have a complex noun phrase as the subject:

(3) The park frequented by many residents is temporarily closed.

In sentence (3), the noun phrase is "The park frequented by many residents". The head noun park is modified by the clause "frequented by many residents".

Because of the intervening clause between the head noun and the verb, it's easy to forget what the real subject of the sentence is and mistake the noun residents for the subject, thus ending up with the grammatically wrong sentence below:

(4) *The park frequented by many residents are temporarily closed.

Sentence (4) is ungrammatical because the noun park is singular but the verb are is plural.

Let's go back to the sentence from the news story. The correct version is sentence (5) below:

(5) News of radiation leaks from one of Japan's nuclear plants has sparked off concerns among many netizens in Singapore.

The noun news is always singular and so takes the singular verb has.

As an exercise on subject-verb concord, try spot the mistake in each screengrab below:

ChannelNewsAsia - 18 November 2010

examenglish.com

AsiaOne - 28 October 2010