Originally Posted by rewboss  Some grammarians are almost dogmatic in their insistence that "there are" is not only acceptable, but the preferred form.
Part of the problem is that there is often more to this than meets the eye. Certainly, you would prefer "There are twenty pounds", as "twenty" is a multiplicity, but what of: "There is/are a hundred"? After all, how many hundreds are there? Why, one, of course! But surely 100 is a big number?
In truth, language changes, evolves and adapts; and in particular, speech changes first and then affects the written language. Much of what we say and write without batting an eyelid would have had our great-grandparents cringing. "If he is French, I'll eat my hat." If he is French? Is there no hope for our generation?
People seldom know how their sentence is going to end when they are speaking, and very often the end of the sentence simply doesn't agree with the beginning. Try tape-recording a relaxed natural conversation, and then attempt to transcribe it; you'll be surprised -- sometimes you won't even be able to tell where one sentence ends and the next begins. So grammatical disagreements crop up time and time again, something like this:
"Oh yes, there's a BMW... er, and a Ford..." -- and there we have it: verb-subject disagreement and it's too late to fix it.
Except... what actually is the subject of the verb? What kind of a verb is this anyway?
Well, the verb "to be" can be used as kind of verb known as a "cupola", and here is where things get complicated. A cupola connects two things that are equal, like a big equals sign:
Football is a sport.
Football = a sport.
So far so good. But what of:
The England football team = 11 dedicated sportsmen.
Hmm. There's one team, but 11 players... and yet they're the same thing. So should the verb be singular or plural?
With most verbs, we distinguish between the subject and the object (or objects), and the verb agrees with the subject. Subject and object are different things: "Pete plays football". With a cupola, we distinguish between subject and complement, and the verb agrees not with the complement, but with the subject:
The England football team is 11 dedicated players.
Now, English has evolved to the point where it no longer has a functioning case system. In languages such as Russian and German, subjects and objects can be distinguished by looking at what case they're in. In English, that is no longer the case; instead, we have to use word order. The subject is that which comes before the main verb:
Dog bites man.
Man bites dog.
Simply swapping the words like this results in a radically different sentence.
Now back to "There is/are dancing classes". What is the subject, and what is the complement?
Trick question. That sentence has no cupola: "to be" here is used to mean "to exist" -- "There exist dancing classes". And that construction is actually an inversion of the usual word order, an archaic construction which lives on and is made possible because "there" cannot be a subject or an object.
However, the overriding impulse in modern English is to make the inflected agree with that which comes in front of the main verb, so the tendency now is to make "there" the singular subject of the sentence.
In truth, the construction "There are dancing classes" actually violates the usual rules for modern English grammar by inverting the order of the verb and subject. "There is dancing classes" restores the natural word order, but violates another rule by making a subject out of a word which, by definition, can never be a subject. When you analyse it, there's little to choose between them. |