Quality matters

AsiaOne - 24 May 2012

The verb matter should be matters, since the head noun quality is singular.

In the original Straits Times report, the verb used by Mr Lee was the singular counts.

Curious about whether Microsoft Word's Spelling and Grammar checker would find any fault with the sentence, I copied and pasted it into Microsoft Word 2007.

In the Suggestions, the grammar checker merely reports "that while PM Lee fully understands the desire for alternate voices in parliament, it is the quality of these voices that matter" as "Wordiness (consider revising)".

Not very helpful in what I was hoping it would do, so I shortened the sentence to "It is the quality of these voices that matter."

Same unhelpful suggestion as above about the sentence being wordy, so I shortened it even further to "The quality of these voices that matter".

The (ungrammatical) sentence passed the grammar check, with or without the relative pronoun that.

Verbs of senses (Part 2)

In Part 1, we answered the question why past tense verbs cannot follow sense words such as hear. For example:

(1) We heard her crying. (not *cried)

That answer is inadequate because it fails to account for a sentence like (2):

(2) We heard John escaped.

In (2) we have the sense verb heard just like in (1), so we might expect the past tense escaped to be unacceptable. Yet escaped is acceptable in (2) after the sense verb heard.

Why, you may wonder.

Well, the answer lies in the clause after the sense verb. In sentence (2), this clause is John escaped and in (1), it is her crying. The former is a finite clause and the latter is a non-finite clause.

A finite clause contains a subject and a verb phrase that carries tense:

(3) He lives here.
(4) She jogged yesterday.

In (3) for example, the verb phrase lives here contains the present tense verb lives, so the clause (which is also the entire sentence) is finite.

We thus say John escaped is finite because it contains a subject John and a finite verb escaped. We can test this in a number of ways. For instance, we can replace John with a subject pronoun he but not with an object pronoun him:

(5) We heard he escaped.
(6) *We heard him escaped.

We can usually insert the conjunction that before a finite clause:

(7) We heard that John escaped.

A non-finite clause, on the other hand, usually does not have an overt subject and carries no tense markers:

(8) She loves to sing.
(9) They made him run.
(10) He dreads getting up so early.

In (8) for example, the clause to sing does not have an overt subject and is not marked for tense, so it is non-finite.

If a clause is non-finite, we can neither use a subject pronoun nor insert the conjunction that:

(11) *We heard she crying.
(12) *We heard that her crying.

The analysis above applies to causative verbs as well:

(13) They made him wait.

The clause him wait is non-finite, because we can't replace him with he and neither can we insert the conjunction that:

(14) *They made he wait.
(15) *They made that him wait.

Using the notion of finiteness, we can easily explain the tensed swam in (16) and the non-tensed swim in (17):

(16) We watched as they swam.
(17) We watched them swim.

Verbs of senses (Part 1)

Many students have trouble choosing the correct form of the verb in the following sentence:

(1) We heard her scream/*screamed for help.

Because of the past tense verb heard, students who are not careful will choose the past tense screamed instead of the bare infinitive scream (or the -ing form screaming).

A similar mistake is often made with the verb make:

(2) They made me wait/*waited.

Again, the wrong verb form waited is chosen because of its connectedness with the past tense made.

So why is the past tense form of the verb unacceptable after verbs such as heard or made? Well, the reason is the verb is preceded by a special class of verbs. Words such as heard fall under verbs of senses while words such as made are called causative verbs.

After verbs of senses, only the bare infinitive or the -ing form of the verb is acceptable:

Subject + Sense verb + Object +  Infinitive / Present participle

(3) We watched them play/playing.
(4) I saw him climb/climbing over the fence.

With causative verbs such as make and help, only the bare infinitive is allowed:

Subject + Causative verb + Object +  Infinitive

(5) She made me laugh.
(6) I helped her complete the puzzle.

In Part 2, we'll look at the structure of the clause after the sense verb or causative verb and explain why only the bare infinitive or the -ing form of the verb is permitted.

An organisational

ChannelNewsAsia - 10 May 2012

Two mistakes in the business news story above. The first relates to subject-verb agreement:

NOL adds that details [of the restructuring plan] are being finalised...

The second is the use of the article a before organisational, a word beginning with a vowel sound. The correct article is an.

I vs me

A reader wanted to know why the subjective I in the sentence below is unacceptable:

(1) *The prize will be shared between you and I.

It's an interesting question, and one that touches on a topic we have planned to write. To answer her question adequately, we need to first know the difference between subject and object pronouns.

Subject pronouns are pronouns that take the place of a subject in a sentence. They are typically in front of the verb:

(2) I am hungry.
(3) She runs fast.

In English, the subject pronouns are I, you, he, she, it, they, and we.

Object pronouns are pronouns that take the place of an object in a sentence. Objects are typically behind the verb:

(4) The car nearly hit him.
(5) They saw me.

English uses the object pronouns me, you, him, her, it, them and us.

Next, we look at the word between in sentence (1). Between is a preposition, and that's an important clue. When a pronoun comes after a preposition, it must be in the objective case:

(6) He was angry with me. (not *with I)
(7) The boss thinks highly of her (not *of she)
(8) They were looking for us (not *for we)

It doesn't matter if other intervening elements come between the preposition and the last pronoun. For example:

(9) He was angry with Peter, you and me.
(10) The boss thinks highly of John, you and her.
(11) They were looking for Mary, Jane and us.

So, the correct pronoun in sentence (1) above is me:

(12) The prize will be shared between you and me.

What about you and I? Well, since I is a subject pronoun (as well as you, though the latter is not obvious because its form doesn't change), we use you and I for subjects:

(13) You and I are expected to attend the party. (not *You and me)

Contents of the fire was?

AsiaOne - May 6, 2012

The verb was is wrong, since the head noun contents is plural and requires the plural verb were.

A similar mistake was made in the story below:

AsiaOne - 3 May 2012

The correct verb is were:

Images [of what seems to be a smiling ghost] were spotted on a bus in Singapore.

The prepositional phrase of what seems to be a smiling female ghost is enclosed in square brackets to make the head noun images obvious to see.

A pair of trousers

Phrases that combine a pair of and binary nouns such as trousers and binoculars are one of those problematic cases of subject-verb agreement.

One reason is that both pair and trousers refer to things comprising two parts, making them potentially troublesome words. To compound the problem, words such as trousers and scissors end with the plural suffix "s", with the consequence that the proximity rule may be wrongly applied.

Not surprisingly, you sometimes see a plural verb used:

?A pair of glasses were broken.

The correct verb in the above is the singular was, since it agrees in number with the singular noun (or partitive) pair.

The rules, as prescribed by most grammar books, are fairly straightforward:

Rule 1: If the noun pair is present, use a singular verb:

(1) The pair of trousers belongs to Jane.
(2) A pair of scissors was found.

Rule 2: If more than a pair is referred to, use a plural verb:

(3) Several pairs of shoes are missing.
(4) Two pairs of spectacles were found at the pool.

Rule 3: If pair is absent, use a plural verb:

(5) These scissors are blunt.
(6)  Those shoes don't belong to him.

An university?

Do you say a university or an university?

The rules on the use the indefinite articles a and an before singular countable nouns are easy to follow: use a before a word beginning with a consonant and use an before a word beginning with the vowel a, e, i, o or u.

These rules give us the following:

an apple, a bicycle, a cat, a doctor
an egg, a fish, a girl, a hamster
an ice-cream, a jar, a key, a lion, a motorcycle, a nail
an orange, a purse, a queen, a racket, a snail, a storm, a torch
an umbrella, a villa, a watermelon, a xylophone, a yawn, a zebra 

But perhaps the rules are intended to be broad and easy to learn, because they only tell us half the story. As you can see, applying them faithfully produces the wrong phrases:

Correct	Incorrect
an umbrella	*an university
a home	*a hour

What's going on here? Why are two of the examples wrong when they follow the indefinite article rules above?

Well, the answer lies in how the words university and hour are pronounced. In other words, the sound is more important than the spelling. To know how a word is pronounced, we can look up a dictionary. Here is an example:

hamster | ˈhæmstə |

(Online tools such as Text to Phonetics provide free transcription.)

The symbols between the two vertical bars give the pronunciation of hamster i.e. the phonetic transcription of hamster.

For this discussion, we need only to concern ourselves with the initial symbol or sound of the phonetic transcription. For hamster, this symbol is the letter h, a consonant sound.

Now let's look at the words umbrella vs university, and home vs hour:

umbrella vs university
umbrella | ʌmˈbrelə |
university | ˌjuːnɪˈvɜːsɪti |

home vs hour
home | həʊm |
hour | ˈaʊə |

The first phonetic symbol for umbrella is ʌ, a vowel sound, so we say an umbrella. For university, the initial sound is j, a consonant sound, so we say a university.

In the next pair, the beginning sound in home is the consonant h so we say a home. The word hour begins with the vowel (a diphthong¹) aʊ, so we say an hour.

1. A diphthong is one indivisible vowel sound that consists of two parts. The first part is the main strong component (the nucleus); the second part is short and weak (the glide).

Years is or years are?

We can count years, can't we? But why is my answer wrong? This student had selected are in a practice question that goes like this:

(1) Five years (is, are) a long time to spend in jail.

His confusion is understandable. After all, the word year is a countable noun like dog and chair and behaves the same way in determiner-noun agreement:

(2) one dog/year, two dogs/years
(3) this dog/year, these dogs/years

And grammar rules on subject-verb agreement say use a singular verb for a singular subject and a plural verb for a plural subject:

(4) One dog is/was missing.
(5) Two dogs are/were missing.

So when he sees the plural years, he wrongly applies the subject-verb agreement rule to produce an awkward sentence below:

(6) ?Five years are a long time to spend in jail.

But the word years is a different animal, though it shares certain agreement and inflectional properties with other count nouns.

Whether the time word takes a singular or plural verb depends on its meaning in the particular context rather than on the presence of any grammatical marker. In other words, agreement according to the principle of notional concord.

When used to refer to a period of time, it takes a singular verb:

(7) Five years is a long time to spend in jail.
(8) Ten years was the time he took to build the robot.

When referring to more than one entity, it takes a plural verb just like other plural count nouns:

(9) Two years are added to the training programme.
(10) The next three years are going to pass quickly.

Besides years, other plural unit words involving money and distance also obey notional concord:

Money
(11) Forty dollars is a good price. (one entity)
(12) Two dollars are on her study table. (more than one entity, like two pens)

Distance
(13) Ten kilometres is not that long. (one entity)
(14) Five miles are to be added to this road. (more than one entity)