'There seems...' 'There seem...'?

Question

Is it always 'There seems...' ? Or we can say 'There seem...' as well.

e.g I made one speech on the subject and I've not referred to it since, and there seems no purpose in doing so.

I referred to the corpus and it returned hits for both 'there seems' and 'there seem'. However, 'there seems' appeared six times more frequently than 'there seem' in the corpus.
This led me to think that 'there seem' is non-standard. The thing that I am not sure of is whether 'there seem' is grammatical.

Thank you

PBF

Mister Micawber · Accepted Answer

.
I am surprised at your results. There is existential, so both forms should be common:

There seem to be many people missing today.
There seems to be someone missing.

Peaceblinkfriend · Answer

Thanks Mister Micawber.

I didn't know much about 'there' and it's nature so I wasn't sure what to make of the results. Just for your information, here are the links to the search results. http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/saraWeb?qy=there+seems http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/saraWeb?qy=there+seem

So when do we use 'seem' or 'seems'?

Thank you again

PBF

Kooyeen · Answer

There seems is singular, there seem is plural.

There seems to be a suspicious guy.
There seem to be several suspicious guys.

CalifJim · Answer

there constructions show agreement between the verb and the noun which follow there.
There [is / was / seems to be / appears to be / has to be / should be / could be / must be] a restaurant on this street.
There [are / were / seem to be / appear to be / have to be / should be / could be / must be] hundreds of restaurants on this street.
CJ

Peaceblinkfriend · Answer

Oh, so this is how it works! I get it now. Thanks for your replies.

PBF

Anonymous · Answer

When "There seem" is followed by "to-infinitive" , the subject is "singular".

There seems to be many people missing.
There seems to be someone missing.

The subject of the sentence is not "many people" but "to be many people", a noun phrase.

Anonymous · Answer

There seem to be many birds....plural
There seems to be a blackbird....singular

It's as easy as that

Anonymous · Answer

but what if you say:

there does seem to be someone missing

or should it be:

there does seems to be someone missing

?

Anonymous · Answer

I wouldn't go along with an earlier reply. This use of there is not "existential", but a similar kind of construction called "presentational". Both kinds have the dummy pronoun there as subject, but existential constructions have be as the verb while presentational clauses have some (intransitive) verb other than be as predicator, such as seem, appear, remain, etc. The principles governing verb agreement apply equally to both kinds of construction.

To address your specific question: the dummy pronoun there is an unusual kind of subject: it has no inherent number but takes on the number of the displaced subject (whose default position is immediately after the verb). It follows that for agreement purposes the verb must match the plurality or otherwise of the displaced subject. In this pair, doubt(s) is the displaced subject:

There seems little doubt about his guilt. [singular doubt, singular verb form]
There seem many doubts about his guilt. [plural doubts, plural verb form]

Best
J

Anonymous · Answer

Neither the managers nor the employers seems happy with the new timing...
OR
Neither the managers nor the employers seem happy with the new timing...
which one is correct please tell me.

'There seems...' 'There seem...'?

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