Job Discussion Forums

[KarenB]

Ok, today we were working on subject-verb agreement, and the following sentence came up:

There is/are a lot of new students.

By my reasoning, the subject of the sentence is "lot" since "students" is the object of the prepositional phrase "of the students."

If lot is the subject, I reasoned it should be considered singular, since it's preceded by the article "a".

Therefore, I chose "is" for the verb -- There is a lot of new students.

However, I received howls of protests from the students, and when we checked their dictionaries, there were sentences using "lot" as a plural word.

Since the termites ate through my grammar guides, I'm hoping someone out there has an explanation for which is the correct answer and why.

[yamahuh]

I am by no means a grammar expert but I would say that 'are' is indubitably the correct choice here; for the following reason:-

In sentences beginning with there is or there are, the subject comes after the verb but the verb agrees with the subject. Since 'there' is not the subject, the verb agrees with what follows.

"A lot of...' is just a quantifier of the subject of the sentence, which is 'students'. Kinda like saying "There are many students' / 'There are few trees on the island'
In these cases you wouldn't make the verb agree with the quantifiers many / few either.

[Midlothian Mapleheart]

Edited to remove offensive content.

Middy

[KarenB]

Ok, from what both of you above indicate, we should treat the phrase "a lot of" as a sort of adjective for the subject "students", rather than say that "of new students" is a prepositional phrase, (as I thought).

[yamahuh]

[Brian Caulfield]

There is lots of answers here. This is the disease of teaching English teachers . I am afraid one day I will be saying things like " My mother he is very old " This and doubling my verbs for emphasis .

[Super Mario]

[yamahuh]

[Midlothian Mapleheart]

Edited to remove offensive content.

Middy

[erinyes]

This leads to the age old question doesn't it? Is strict adherence to grammar really that important? Realistically, to be an effective communicator you don't need to be able to explain the how and the why of the contraction of a sentence, but instead to construct a sentence that sounds pretty much about right by the reckoning of any mildly well educated individual.

Incidentally �Microsoft Word� thinks �There are a lot of new students� is correct.

The Grammar Checker has underlined the �is� in the sentence with a little green line and suggests �are� as an alternative.

[Midlothian Mapleheart]

Edited to remove offensive content.

Middy

[yamahuh]

[latefordinner]

Whoa, slow down Middy, get your breath back. I for one agree with your earlier post:

[Gregor]

I agree that being strict grammarians is taking things a little too seriously. With the OP's question, for example, I think there is ample evidence - and prescident - for either possibility. This isn't maths, after all.

On the other hand, though, I think it's important for teacher of English - especially of ESL - to take this kind of question seriously. It IS pertinant, if a little nit-picky. Especially in China, where the local language operates in SUCH a different way than English does, the students can get quite worked up over these sorts of questions.
(And notice that last sentence above, as an example. There were lots of places where I could have screwed up the subject/verb agreement. Slight details like this can make a world of difference in Chinese, and the students can be understandably nervous about such mistakes.)

I think that it's important to know how to deal with these questions. In this case: "There are a lot of students" vs. "There is a lot of students," I feel more comfortabe with "is," but the best answer, in my opinion, to a Chinese learner of English , would be, "It doesn't really matter." And then point out that "a lot" would suggest a singular verb but "students" suggests a plural one.

It can open up quite a discussion, depending on how interested the students are. I mean, "Everyone in the class was confused." Why "was"?? It's CLEARLY a plural subject, but it has to have a singular verb.
And how about "a large number of"? That would just as clearly take a singular verb. Why is that? I know, but the students won't - they don't HAVE singular and plural verbs.
Subject/verb agreement can be so sticky that it's often best to just suggest recasting the sentence - "A lot of students" can easily become "many students," and then you have a clear need for a plurtal verb.

See, some of you think this is anal. I think it's fun.

[bearcanada]

Greetings;

The correct use of the word 'lot' is as a singular noun, not as an adjective or quantifier as some have suggested. Problems like this arise often because we take words into colloquial usage and change their meaning over time. And the language becomes corrupted.

A 'lot' is a thing in itself, a commercial term meant to signify a collection of goods, as in 'how much for that lot of lumber?', or in purchasing 'job lots' of something. If you look at wholesale or factory ads of goods for sale you will often see things like '$20,000 for the lot', or '$6,000 for all three lots'.

We have brought the word 'lot' into common usage and have corrupted it by often using it to mean 'many' or 'a whole bunch', or some such.

The proper and correct expression is 'there IS a lot of students'; or you could say 'there ARE lots of students', meaning more than one lot.

However, once these colloquial (and misused) expressions become sufficiently common, dictionaries make adjustments to reflect common usage and so you now find (some) books reflecting the new meaning accordingly.

To now say that either usage is more correct is probably just a reflection of how much of a purist any of us are. "LOT" is definitely a singular noun, but if 95% of people are using it (and "LOTS") as a kind of quantifying adjective, do we want to fight that? I usually do fight it, but the only result is that everybody disagrees with me.

There are a lot of words (just kidding) like this in English. "Bunch" is the same. It means a group of things that can be 'bunched', like flowers on stems, but we often use it to mean 'many' of something - like a bunch of students. In real life you cannot have 'a bunch of students', but we say it anyway and dictionaries will probably reflect that.

The word 'unique' is slowly being corrupted too, to its detriment. "Unique" means "one of a kind", only one in existence, so a thing cannot be 'very unique' or 'quite unique' for e.g., but we see these expressions all the time.

More importantly, we seem to be losing our understanding of the words 'its' and 'it's'. "It's" is a contraction for 'it is' or 'it has'. "Its" is a possessive pronoun meaning 'belonging to' something. (There is no such word as "Its' "). This is one we should try to get right.

Cheers,