Jungle gyms and monkey bars

[Laurence Horn]

On May 3, 2012, at 8:05 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> Speaking of discrepancies, I have the strong feeling that I may well
> be the only native-speaker of English who "knows" that the "proper"
> forms are
>
> a) "… _ONE_ [of the few who still] _distinguishES_ …"
>
> as opposed to, e.g.
>
> b) "… _SOME_ [of the few who still] _distinguish_ …"
>
> I've become consciously aware of this so recently - I notice it in
> literature, but not in speech - that I don't know whether it's dialect
> - a black thing; you would't understand - or idiolect - even *I* don't
> understand how I came to have these structures, but *not*
>
> c) "… [one of the] FEW [who still] _distinguish_ …"
>
> which I used above only as a sop to my readers.
> --
>
Why isn't it "…one [of [the FEW who still distinguish…]]"

Notice the possibility of "Of the few who still distinguish…, I am one"

Could you say "Of the few who still distinguishes…, I am one"?

Or consider "he's one of the guys who are surrounding the house"; could you say "he's one of the guys who is surrounding the house"?


(Granted I'm only constructing a syntactic argument or two to prove the correctness of my brute intuition, but still.)

LH

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