subject-verb agreement

Question

I went with Presidential Rooms 3 and 4, which costs $900.00 a day.is the above sentence correct?  or should it be "cost' singular?

Clive · Accepted Answer

Hi,

Is that the cost of each room, or of both?

Clive

Anonymous · Answer

both

Anonymous · Answer

it is the cost for both rooms

Enoon · Answer

Please don't text in here. I drives me up the wall. You observe typographical convention when you have to in your example, and then you let yourself get sloppy with fragments and no capitals and haphazard punctuation when actually addressing us. It's offputting and seems disrespectful. We care about English in here, stands to reason.

You need to recast the sentence. There is a flaw that makes selection of conjugation impossible. What is the antecedent of "which", the subject of that clause? It it "Rooms", or is it the whole first clause, your choice? The reader can't decide, and neither can we, apparently. Try something like, "I went with Presidential Rooms 3 and 4, which together cost $900.00 a day." The antecedent is "Rooms".

Clive · Answer

Hi,

This is the kind of casual English which in my experience people use every day. Often. we say something and then leave the listener to ask questions about anything that we have left unclear. That's the nature of a lot of of real-life communication.

I went with Presidential Rooms 3 and 4, which costs $900.00 a day.
This sounds like you mean 'the act of going with those two rooms' costs $900 a day.
We typically use Simple Present like this in a situation where we are thinking of the money as a present cost, eg we haven''t paid yet.

I went with Presidential Rooms 3 and 4, which cost $900.00 a day.
This sounds like you want the subject of the clause to be 'the two rooms', ie plural.
Note this about the tense possibilities.

Which cost . . . can be interpreted as Simple Present, again suggesting we are thinking of the money as a present cost,eg not paid yet.
Which cost . . . can also be interpreted as Simple Past, suggesting we are thinking of the money as a past cost, eg we may have paid already. In fact, the whole sentence may even refer to some event that was completely in the past, eg 10 years ago.

Clive

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