Making Subjects and Verbs Agree - Coursework Example

1. There's hundreds of students waiting outside. This sentence is prescriptively ungrammatical but descriptively grammatical. For me, it sounds ungrammatical because in this case, I go with the prescriptive grammar. However, to explain both cases, in prescriptive grammar, the verb should agree in number with the logical subject. In this sentence, ‘there and ‘hundreds of students’ are the two subjects. ‘Hundreds of students’ is the logical subject, while ‘there’ is an expletive or ‘dummy’ subject (Svenonius, 2002). Prescriptive grammar insists on getting the verb agree in number with the logical subject and therefore this sentence is ungrammatical. ‘Is’ is a singular verb and goes with singular nouns, but ‘hundreds of students’ being plural, this sentence is ungrammatical. However, by the norms of descriptive grammar based on how the sentence sounds to a native speaker, this sentence is grammatically correct as the verb can agree with any of the two types of subjects and in this sentence ‘is’ agrees with ‘there’ as both are singular. 2. Who's there? It's me and Lisa. This is descriptively grammatical but prescriptively ungrammatical. For me, this is grammatical as it is commonly used by native speakers and is a part of English language register. It is prescriptively ungrammatical as ‘me’ is an object pronoun and this sentence uses object pronoun in the place of subject pronoun (Purdue University, 2015c). The question part of the given utterance uses ‘who’ to elicit a response and stands in subject position. 3. Ain't nobody gonna tell me what to do. This is grammatical, in my opinion, as I go with the descriptive grammar in this case and consider that the meaning of this utterance is fully conveyed in a native speaker context as they usually use double negatives for negation: ‘not’ and ‘nobody’. Also, the use of ‘ain’t’, although unacceptable in prescriptive grammar, there is a tendency among native speakers to use this contraction for various purposes in different contexts, such as in poetry for metrical reasons (Ain’t, 2015). It also helps emphasize an idea or get the attention to an issue, so I consider the sentence grammatical. Also, the use of ‘gonna’ is not standard English according to prescriptive grammar and it has to be ‘going to’, but the wide usage of the expression in informal language has made it descriptively acceptable and grammatical. However, I consider it as ungrammatical in certain contexts such as academic writing or formal speech, but consider grammatical in lyrics or in informal conversations (Woodward, 2015). 4. You wasn't here when he come looking for you. There are two reasons for which I consider this sentence ungrammatical. Firstly, ‘you wasn’t’ is ungrammatical prescriptively based on verb conjugation rules. Secondly, ‘he come’ is ungrammatical judged by subject-verb agreement rules in prescriptive grammar and there is also a verb tense inconsistency within the sentence (Purdue University, 2015b). To take the first case, the second person personal pronoun ‘you’ takes a plural ‘to be verb’ irrespective of whether the second person is singular or plural and therefore it has to be ‘you weren’t’. In the second case, ‘he come’, there is a problem of verb tense inconsistency as ‘come’ and ‘was’ do not match in terms of tense. The sentence describes two actions that happened in the past and therefore need past tense verb forms in both positions (Purdue University, 2015d). So, I think it is ungrammatical to say ‘he come’. 5. I hate lobsters anymore. This sentence is ungrammatical to me as it is ambiguous whether the speaker doesn’t hate lobsters anymore or has just started to hate them from now on. “We use no more and not any more as adverbs to talk about something stopping or ending” (No more, not any more, 2015, 1). 6. Are y'all coming to see us soon? I think this sentence is grammatical as I can understand what the message is. It means ‘are you all coming to see us soon?’ and ‘y’all’ is to be considered as a contraction, a widely used native-like informal style, mostly in the Southern parts of the USA (Okrent, 2014). I have based my opinion on the grammaticality of this utterance purely on the acceptance of the Southern dialect. 7. That chair's broke, so you shouldn't ought to sit on it. I think this sentence is not grammatical. Firstly, ‘chair’s broke’ uses a ‘to be’ verb and a past verb which do not go together. However, in the context of this sentence, the speaker refers to the condition of the chair in the present due to something that happened in the past. Secondly, two modal verbs are unnecessary as it makes the utterance sound wordy and ungrammatical. It does not sound native-like and is therefore not descriptively grammatical too. Should is a modal auxiliary and ought to is a semi-modal auxiliary verb referring to obligation or duty. Using just ‘shouldn’t sit’ or ‘ought not sit’ will serve the purpose. Moreover, in an informal context, ‘ought to’ makes it sound too formal (Ought to, 2015). 8. I can't remember the name of the hotel that we stayed in it. I think it is ungrammatical. ‘It’ at the end of the sentence is unnecessary repetition of the object as ‘that’ is a relative pronoun used as an object pronoun (Purdue University, 2015a). ‘Hotel’ is the object talked about here, which is referred in the subordinate clause using ‘that’. Why then there should be yet another pronoun ‘it’? 9. I never seen anything. I think this sentence is ungrammatical as the meaning of the utterance is unclear. However, if contextualized, it could be considered grammatical descriptively. Does the utterance refer to an experience or a particular incident in the past? It is unclear and therefore is not grammatical. It should be ‘never saw’ or ‘have never seen’, at least to make the meaning clear, if not for any hypercorrect prescriptive grammar. 10. If you'd have come with, we'd have had more fun. Descriptively, this sentence sounds grammatical because the meaning gets conveyed within a group of native speakers in spite of the tense errors and the exemption of ‘us’ at the end of the ‘if’ clause. However, I think this sentence is ungrammatical based on the prescriptive grammar. It is a third conditional, but with a tense agreement problem that makes it ungrammatical. Also, it makes me ask the question: ‘come with what?’ and there is a gap in meaning in this structure. As this is an imagined condition about something that did not happen in the past, the conditional clause needs a past perfect following the ‘if’. However, this sentence uses ‘would’ in the form of contraction you’d and a present perfect, which makes this sentence less grammatical (Conditionals: if, 2015). References Ain’t (2015). In Merriam-Webster.com. Retrieved February 21, 2015, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ain%27t Conditionals: if (2015). In Cambridge dictionaries online. Retrieved February 21, 2015, from http://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/conditionals-if No more, not any more (2015). In Cambridge dictionaries online. Retrieved February 21, 2015, from http://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/no-more-not-any-more Purdue University (2015a). Introduction and general usage in defining clauses. Retrieved from https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/645/01/ Purdue University (2015b). Making subjects and verbs agree. Retrieved from https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/599/01/ Purdue University (2015c). Pronoun case. Retrieved from https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/595/02/ Purdue University (2015d). Verb tense consistency. Retrieved from https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/601/04/ Okrent, A. (2014). Can "y'all" mean just one person? Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/10/03/y_all_to_just_one_person_exaggerated_southern_english.html Ought to (2015). In Cambridge dictionaries online. Retrieved from http://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/ought-to Svenonius, P. (2002). Subjects, expletives, and the EPP. New York : Oxford University Press. Woodward (2015). Be going to. Retrieved from http://www.grammar.cl/Notes/Going_To.htm Read More