Teacher Discussion Forums

I have been noticing recently the widespread use of "there's" for both "there is" and "there are" among native speakers here in the US. People rarely say "there are" or "there're", but prefer to use the singular form across the board. Is "there're" just too hard to say?Seems like it's useless to fight it.

Do you hear this, too, in the UK?

And, have any of you noticed what people do with the past? Do they use both "there was" and "there were"?

Interesting, though, isn't it, that Spanish does the same thing: "habia" is the correct form whether the predicate is singular or plural. I don't think "habian" is particularly hard to pronounce, though, so could it be there is something about this concept that the brain doesn't like the plural?

In English we are used to having the number of the verb governed by what comes before, not after.

Harzer had discovered the same tendency you mention in Australia. I think us Brits haven't noticed it so much.

In the British National Corpus there are 2292 examples of 'there are two' compared to just six (0.2%) for 'there is two'.

Google gives 29,000,000 for "there are two" and 115,000 for "there is two", (1%) and many of the examples of "there is two" do have a singular subject.

Stephen Jones wrote:
Google gives 29,000,000 for "there are two" and 115,000 for "there is two", (1%) and many of the examples of "there is two" do have a singular subject.

...and 341,000 for "there's two," which, I thought, was the point. I have caught myself using "there's" with a plural. (There's some cookies on the table.) but never with "there is" (There is some cookies on the table...bleah) Yes, I've been horrified to hear myself use "there's" as well, but I think that was Tara B's initial question. I think it's more of a spoken thing in American English, although I have seen it in headlines occasionally.

I agree than there is with a plural is more likely to occur in spoken language and SJ's statistics would appear to bear this out. Isn't it simply that case that when we speak we have less time to plan our utterances, so we are more likely to commit "mistakes" by starting with there's out of habit and going on to say something plural. When we write, we think ahead and edit and so are more likely to use there are.

Postings on message boards seem to fall somewhere between the two. It would be interesting to know how many of SJ's instances of there is two come from message boards or similar situations where the writing is likely to be more spontaneous and informal. By providing raw statistics without context, corpuses and Google searches are a rather blunt tool.

Something wrong with my math. 115,000 is 0.35%

So the new figure is closer to 1.3%

Tne search engine at http://view.byu.edu/ allows you to specify registers and is is anything but the blunt instrument lolwhites mentions.

Incidentally the figure of six doesn't change because ''s'is included in 'is'

Too bad there's no spoken corpus.