Why do we say 'A lot of people drink beer', and not 'A lot of people drinks beer'? Below is an explanation by a native AmE speaker, who is a senior member of WordReference.com, one of the major online discussion forums on language matters:
'In the sentence "A lot of people drink beer," the subject "lot" is singular, so the rule tells us that the verb should be "drinks." But there is no native English speaker who would use the singular in this construction. The verb in this case matches the object of the prepositional phrase (something that is never supposed to happen) because the speaker intends the phrase "a lot of people" to mean "many people." '
An eye-opening analysis.
https://forum.wordreference.com/.../tons-of-rubbish-is.../
No comments:
Post a Comment