Determining verb-noun agreement

Question

Could you determine if the verb-noun agreement is correct by referring to the noun/subject of the sentence and negating the rest of the sentence including modifiers?
For example:
-Half of the books were on sale.
Could you ignore 'half of' and read the sentence as 'The books were on sale' to know that it's correct?
What about the word 'class'?
-Half of the class has a 3.9 GPA.

Enoon · Accepted Answer

"Half" is the nominal subject of those sentences. There is no easy way to get the right number of the verb, but it tends to go for the nearest noun, partly because "half" has something of the pronoun about it, and the object of "of" is its referent. You could say that half were on sale.

There are problems, though. For example, look at:

Half of the country was in revolt.
Half of the country were in revolt.

Either is right depending on whether you choose to construe the half country as individuals or a mass. The same goes for "class". English is messy when it comes to this.

CalifJim · Answer

drdmt2013Could you determine if the verb-noun agreement is correct by referring to the noun/subject of the sentence and negating the rest of the sentence including modifiers?

I don't see that your method involves the negation of anything. It's much simpler to remember that when it comes to expressions like X of Y as a subject, the verb agrees with X most of the time (The king of the elves is asleep) , but it agrees with Y in certain cases. The following belong to the latter class:

A lot of Y, Lots of Y, Plenty of Y, The rest of Y, The remainder of Y, All of Y, Some of Y, None of Y.

Some of the cards are missing.
Some of the meat is spoiled.

Any fractional amount or percent like Half of Y, Two-thirds of Y, Forty percent of Y, etc.

Half of the books were on sale.
Ten percent of the mixture was transferred to a test tube for further study.

Of these None of Y is controversial. Many present-day grammarians insist that the verb should always be singular after this expression in spite of the fact that the plural has also been used for centuries by some of our best writers (when Y is plural).

You may find this one unusual.

The number of Ys takes a singular verb.
A number of Ys takes a plural verb.
________________________

Don't forget that for purposes of agreement the subject is after the verb in a there-construction.

There is lots of sugar in the bowl.
There are a number of children here who come to school by bus.

CJ

Determining verb-noun agreement

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