guido guidette

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Jan 24, 2010, at 11:09 PM, Seán Fitzpatrick wrote:

> Not to mention this example of hypercorrection:
> 'In any case, as Labov said on NPR a few years ago: “Whatever the
> influence
> of the mass media are, it doesn’t affect the way we speak every
> day...."'

hmmm.  one part of the example is treating "media" as a plural (as in
"The mass media are often misleading").  this is prescriptively
correct, and is some people's general practice; some people are
variable in the matter,

however, the problem with the example is "are" with subject "the
influence of the mass media".  this isn't hypercorrection, but a
routine example of "agreement with the nearest", triggered (especially
in speech, but not only there) by a postnominal modifier ending in a
noun differing in number from the head.

i have 35 examples in my files.  not very many, but then the
phenomenon comes up so often that i usually don't bother to note it.

the MWDEU _agreement_ entry notes the "principle of proximity" (the
terminology used by Quirk et al. 1985), also called "attraction" and
"blind agreement", with a reference to Barbara Strang's 1970
treatment, which cites an example from Swift.  the phenomenon is
regularly noted in usage handbooks.

arnold

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