a bunch of the boys ?was/?were...

[Wilson Gray]

On Feb 27, 2005, at 11:29 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      a bunch of the boys ?was/?were...
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> I was struck by the following sentence in a review (NYT Book Review,
> 2/27/05, p. 17) of JT LeRoy's "Harold's End" by Albert Mobilio, who
> edits the fiction section of Bookforum:
> -----
> "Harold's End" is set in the parks and alleys of San Francisco, where a
> group of teenage hustlers takes drugs and turns tricks.
> -----
>
> I would have gone for "take" and "turn" myself, but it's an arguable
> point.

It's not an arguable point at all. You are correct, sir. All that one
need do is apply the relevant prescriptive rule:

1) "The group" et sim. require a singular verb phrase.

2) "A group" et sim. require a plural verb phrase.

-Wilson [I do but jest, of course. But (1) and (2) above are real
prescriptive rules that I was taught in high school.]

>
> Ncollective + [ of + NPpl ] is taken up by MWDEU under the heading
> "agreement, subject-verb: a bunch of the boys" (as in the immortal line
> "A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon").  Its
> advice is that when the sense is plural, as it usually is, the verb
> should be too, though some grammatical sticklers insist that the PP is
> just a partitive (as in "a vase of flowers") so the agreement should be
> singular.
>
> Now, there are some collective Ns that have been completely
> grammaticalized as determiners and so are transparent to the number and
> count/mass classification of the head N: a lot of shrubbery has thorns,
> a lot of shrubs have/*has thorns.  For me, there are a few collective
> Ns that are invariably heads: The committee/team was/*were working on
> reports.  For me, the subject-verb agreement remains singular even when
> a plural anaphoric pronoun is called for; The committee/team was/*were
> working on their/??its individual reports.  (Others, especially British
> speakers, have other judgments here.  CGEL, section 18.2 of chapter 5,
> has an extensive discussion of the collective facts, taking "committee"
> as the paradigm example of a noun allowing either agreement.)
>
> In any case, for me, most other collective Ns permit either agreement,
> though they strongly trigger plural agreement when the sense is plural,
> as it is with taking drugs and turning tricks.
>
> MWDEU displays several examples of the Mobilio sort, which it suggests
> "may be the result of nervous copy editors or indecision on the part of
> the writers".  Ah, the perils of instruction.
>
> arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)
>