Teacher Discussion Forums

"The only hint that this could possibly be an area with a cinema were some free-standing bulletin boards with tattered posters on them."

How about it? Any corrections?

This sentence contains a singular subject and a plural predicate noun. The verb is supposed to agree with the subject in these constructions, but the result can sound awkward.

A better sentence would be,
"Some free-standing bulletin boards with tattered posters on them were the only hint that this could possibly be an area with a cinema."

Singular subject and plural predicate. As ouyang says you come unstuck either way.

I think what rules here is proximity.
The evidence was the hundreds of bloody handprints left at the scene.
The evidence that led to his conviction were the hundreds of bloody handprints left at the scene.

According to the proximity principle, the verb in my alternative sentence should be the singular "was" instead of the plural "were" because the new singular predicate noun "hint" is in closer proximity to it than the plural subject "boards" is. I think that's a good enough reason for not correcting a constuction like this in a student's composition.

As a writer, I just avoid these sorts of sentences. I might use them in a draft and then look for a substitute later on. That's kind of a cop out, but maybe I'm just a non-confrontational kind of guy.

The aversion to plural verb + singular complement seems much less than that to singular verb + plural complement.

Like you I would always recast singular verb + plural complement sentences.

As I recall, one language log article argued that however much stuff appears between the subject and the verb, they should agree, or the sentence is wrong. I find that pretty inconsistent from those arch descriptivists, since obviously when the two things are far apart there is a pretty strong tendency for them to not always agree, and for proximity with other things to become important. Most people would therefore judge the sentence as unproblematic, I suspect.

However, I do agree. "Correctness" isn't just about usage. It is also about agreeing with the rules and the rule-makers. There is no need to recast - I find that too unwieldy a rule of composition. Make the subject and verb agree.