A misunderstanding of English grammar, III
December 29, 2002
by Dr Winford James
The thorough teacher, says Undine Giuseppi, would not stop at the subject-verb agreement rule that states that singular subjects take singular verbs and plural subjects take plural verbs. She would 'amplify the rule by reference to Subject Pronoun-verb agreement.' And therein lies the problem!
Amplifying the problem implies at least two things: 1) that the rule as stated is insufficient, and 2) if the rule is presented in a textbook, that the teacher would know that there is a need for amplification. The rule is indeed insufficient, and many teachers do not appear to know, at least from the kind of instruction they routinely give, that the rule could do with amplification.
How might a teacher amplify the rule through reference to subject-pronoun subjects proceed? She would have to be contrastive or concessionary. She would state the rule first and then say something like the following: 'But this is only so when the subject is a noun. If the subject is a pronoun, then it is not a matter of whether the pronoun is singular or plural, but of whether the pronoun is third person singular or otherwise. If it is third person singular, it takes the singular form of the verb, that is, the '-s' or its variants. If it is otherwise, it takes the bare verb, that is, the verb without '-s' or its variants.'
But that kind of amplification is clearly cumbersome and confusing. It is cumbersome because, added to the rule, it says things that can be far more economically stated. A more economical rule would be something like the following, already given in Part II: Add an 's' (or 'es' or 'ies', as the case may be) to the verb if the subject is THIRD PERSON SINGULAR; leave the verb as bare as it is if the subject is anything else. It has the advantage of covering the essential conditions of (grammatical) subject-verb agreement and of being more general than Giuseppi's rule. Critically, it covers both noun and pronoun subjects!
In contrast, Giuseppi's rule focuses on noun subjects and needs to be AMPLIFIED in order to accommodate pronoun subjects.
There is confusion in the amplification as well, at least in my version of it. If the rule assigns '-s' to singular subject nouns, you would expect it to assign '-s' also to singular pronoun subjects. But it doesn't in the case of 'I' and 'You' (singular), where absence of 's', the zero form for plural subject nouns, is used instead. But then, this zero form is assigned to plural subject pronouns, as you would expect. Confusion! What, you may well ask, is the real grammatical status of '-s' and absence of '-s'?
The fact of the matter is that '-s' is unambiguously the agreement form only for THIRD PERSON SINGULAR SUBJECTS, whether noun ones or pronoun ones, and absence of '-s' is the agreement form for ALL OTHER KINDS OF SUBJECTS, whether nouns or pronouns.
Absolutely no amplication is needed for this grammatical fact, only illustrations.
Of course, amplication is required for our economical rule where matters like the following are concerned: notional (as opposed to grammatical) subjects (e.g., 'people', 'police', 'England', 'media'); plural forms not ending in '-s' (e.g., sheep, cattle, deer); singular nouns ending in '-s' (e.g., 'billiards', 'measles'); nouns ending in '-ics' (e.g., 'economics', 'politics', 'linguistics', 'ethics'); coordinated subjects (e.g., 'Giuseppi and James', 'Mills, or her Sunday editor, Monsegue'; 'Neither Giuseppi nor James'; and agreement and proximity (e.g., 'One of the players ?has/?have').
But I digress.
What too many educators do in the matter of subject-verb agreement in English is to take that part of the rule that relates to subject nouns and to pass it off as if it is the basic rule that needs amplification. Clearly, it is nothing of the sort.
One more thing. There are no green verbs in Creole, for there is no subject-verb agreement. Every subject takes the same form of verb in beautiful symmetry. English has the strange exception of the THIRD PERSON SINGULAR SUBJECT ONLY taking a verb ending in '-s', but Creole is completely regular. So I DOES eat mi black cake when Christmas come. You DOES eat your-own. She/He DOES eat she-/he-own. We DOES eat our-own. Allyou DOES eat allyou-own. And dem DOES eat they-own.
Peace, health, and wealth, cherished readers!
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