Korean Job Discussion Forums

[JAWINSEOUL]

Hello everyone,

I need a little help regarding countable nouns with modifiers. These two sentences are from a textbook and I'm not sure how they could be correct.

#1 Everyday more than 100 million tons of oil is shipped.

#2 Almost a million tons of oil were released into the Persian Gulf.

(Although oil in uncountable the unit of measure should act as a modifier and make it "are" for #1. I thought maybe the writer was mentioning it a lump sum and ignoring the modifier)

Any ideas.

Thanks

[icnelly]

bump - I'm interested; can someone help?

[The Bobster]

Offhand, JAWINSEOUL, I think you are right and the book is wrong. Grammar with regard to plural nouns vary somewhat across the Atlantic and elsewhere - I'm a Yank- so it might be more than that. Suggest you wait for Woland to drop by, it's his forte. Or pm him.

[JAWINSEOUL]

[Woland]

Gotta work in a minute, so a detailed answer will have to wait. For strict grammatical purposes, both are singular:

#1: ...oil is...

#2: ...oil was...

There are complexities to this that explain why people might use the plural form, especially in speech. I'll get to that.

[Woland]

[Snowkr]

Try looking in Azar if you have access to it in Korea.

I'm working on a grammar development project for German students at the moment and finishing up my M.A. in TESOL. Wait till you teach adjective clauses using "where".

For what it's worth, I'm American as well and I teach "tons" as countable because the unit itself can be made plural. I would also classify this as the subject and say that you must use "are" instead of "is". Then again, I can understand why some would classify "oil" as the subject instead in which case, it would be "is"!

Who invented this language anyway? My smarta$$ed Europeans are always asking me this...
I always tell them not to blame the Americans. We just took the language and made it "speakable".

[Woland]

I just went looking to see where I could I direct snowkr to back up my claim and have found that I'm wrong.

"Tons of X" is a partitive construction, not a quantifier in the form of phrasal modifier. The two forms are close, but distinct. Phrasal quantifiers are a closed set, while partitives are open. Quantifiers can modify partitives, but not vice versa (this is the key distinction). Any precise measure is a partitive.

And for our purposes, the partitive noun serves as the subject of the sentence. 'Tons' is plural; therefore, the verbs should be 'are'/'were'.

You can look it up like I did in chapter 17 of Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman's The Grammar Book (see in particular p. 326).

The confusion, then, isn't phonological, though that still may play a role, but because the two types of construction are so similar. Fooled me.

[JAWINSEOUL]

Thanks, wonderful answers from everyone. Here is what I explained to the Korean teacher that asked me.

#1 "Tons of" is not a modifying phrase because it is used to divide the oil into parts. This is used for any specific unit of measure.

#2 Since the word tons is (plural) using the plural forms are/were is correct.

Much appreciated everyone.

[jeffkim1972]

Every day, more than 100 million TONS of oil is shipped.

Reverse the sentence (comma rule).

More than 100 million TONS of oil is shipped Every day.

TON as the subject
A TON is shipped Every day.
Two TONS are shipped Every day.
100 Million TONS are shipped every day.
100 Million TONS (of oil) are shipped every day.

Oil as the subject
Oil is shipped Every day.
Much Oil is shipped Every day.

Because of the "100 million" countable modifier, TONS is the subject, not Oil.

So the book is wrong.

[Snowkr]

Good idea turning it into a passive sentence.
I've had to do this myself when trying to make such judgements about grammar.

A book should be written just on teaching this point of countable and uncountable nouns! They can get a bit complex...