Subject-Verb Agreement With Intervening Prepositional Phrases
A fancy title for a simple concept.
Another blogger asked the Grammar Guru, “Will you please teach people about proper subject-verb agreement — especially in cases where the subject may seem to be plural, but really isn’t . . . as in a flock of seagulls? I am getting quite sick of seeing things such as “The flock of seagulls are flying south . . . “
As is the Grammar Guru.
This is a common problem with a very simple solution. Strip your sentence bare. Remember how your grammar teacher used to tell you that a sentence consists of a noun and a verb, along with a few modifiers? Well, that’s what’s going on in my reader’s example. To make sure that you have the correct verb tense for your subject, you have to strip the basic noun+verb sentence of all its modifiers. (This is why teachers made you diagram. So you’d learn to peel a sentence apart.)
The flock of seagulls is/are flying south. The two crucial word in this sentence are “flock” and “is/are.” The words “the, of, seagulls, flying, south” are all modifiers. I’m not going to go into all of them here. The ones we are concerned with are “of” and “seagulls.” They make up a prepositional phrase that modifies “flock.” (What kind of flock is it? A flock of seagulls.) “Of” is the preposition (and you should have memorised those in school), and “seagulls” is the object of the preposition. “Flock” is a collective noun, and is therefore singular. There may be thirty seagulls in the flock, but there’s only one flock.
So which verb to use? Well, I hope you would not say “Flock are.” “Flock” requires the singular verb “is.”
This test will work for nearly any situation in which you find a subject modified by a prepositional phrase. (It’s worth noting that the confusion usually occurs when the subject is singular (especially the collective singular) and the object of the preposition is plural. For some reason, the plural subject with a singular object of preposition doesn’t tend to confuse people.)
Examples:
- The boy with the out-of-town guests was/were playing baseball. (“was”)
- The apples from the boy is/are on the teacher’s desk. (“are”)
- The envelopes containing the invitations to the wedding is/are in the box. (“are”)
- The bowl of apples, pears, and bananas is/are on the table. (“is”)
- The herd of cows was/were walking to the milking shed. (“was”)