Dr Winford James
trinicenter.com

Plural verbs in English?

By Dr. Winford James
November 07, 2004


Let me immediately state my thesis: There are no plural verbs in English - despite what your teachers taught and continue to teach you. Yes, the verb forms 'are', 'have', 'do', and 'were' are not plural even though they come after plural subjects. So that even though they can correctly fill the space after the plural subject in the sentence frame 'The children -------- your lesson.', they are not plural.

Which would mean that Undine Giuseppi and Kevin Baldeosingh are wrong. The venerable Giuseppi often speaks of plural and singular English verbs in her Sunday column. And the usually careful Baldeosingh was impressed, in his commentary on Mr. Manning's budget speech for fiscal 2005, by the use of a 'plural verb' with the noun 'data'. (I allow though that Baldeosingh might argue that he used the term because it is what his readers would most readily understand.)

I too was taught by my primary and secondary teachers that singular verbs went with singular subjects and plural verbs went with plural subjects. And yes, I generally got the exercises right, especially those where the verb forms were 'is/are' (from the infinitive 'be'), 'was/were' (also from the infinitive 'be'), 'has/have' (from the infinitive 'have'), and 'do/does' (from the infinitive 'do'). Somehow I applied the 'rule' with mastery even though: 1) the singular subjects 'I' and 'You' also went with the 'plural' verbs 'have' and 'do' and 2) the singular subject 'You' did not go with the 'singular' verbs 'is', 'was', 'has', and 'does'. These were exceptions to the 'rule'. In any event, 'You' and 'I' are pronouns, and the 'rule' had nothing to do, it was sometimes said, with subjects that were pronouns but everything to do with subjects that were nouns. Set the pronouns aside and the 'rule' was fine.

Setting the pronoun subjects aside, my teachers also taught me that, apart from the verbs 'be', 'have', and 'do', main verbs like 'drink' have a singular and a plural form. In the sentence 'The cat drinks milk', for example, the singular form, '-s', occurs - to agree with the singular noun subject 'cat'; and in the sentence 'Cats drink milk', the plural form, which is silence or nothing, occurs - to agree with the plural noun subject 'Cats'. I had to 'remember' that this 'rule' was the reverse of the 'rule' for forming the plural of regular nouns, which was that the singular noun carried silence or nothing at its end while the plural noun carried an '-s'.

In brief, a singular verb carries '-s' but a singular noun carries silence or nothing; and a plural verb carries silence or nothing but a plural noun carries an '-s'.

The 'rules', probably through no fault of the language, made for confusion, and it took me a little while to make the distinction in practice in my primary years. Others did not fare so well. Indeed, to this day, there are students and teachers across the levels of our education system, including university, who get them wrong. A routine error is to match 'plural' verbs with singular noun subjects (as, e.g., in 'The cat drink milk') but 'singular' verbs with plural noun subjects (as in, e.g., 'The cats drinks milk'). Mrs. Giuseppi frequently laments the routine misuse by reporters, editors, and others in the newspapers, which she attributes to a failure of memory.

From the perspective of both the observable patterns in the language and learnability, the 'rules' are clearly wrong. Let's deal first with observable patterns. In English, there are various kinds of subjects, including noun, pronoun, and phrase ones, and in their relationship with verbs there is really a very simple regular pattern: With 3RD PERSON SINGULAR subjects (whether nouns, pronouns, or phrases) the verb carries an '-s', but with ALL OTHER KINDS of subjects it carries silence or nothing. It is as simple as that, but read it again, slowly.

So that, where main verbs other than 'be', 'have', and 'do' are concerned, the '-s' goes only with 3RD PERSON SINGULAR subjects while nothing is added when the subject is OTHERWISE. To wit: 'The cat drinks milk' versus '{I, You, We, They, The cats} drink milk'.

Even where 'be', 'have', 'do' are concerned, the pattern holds - for the most part. One has to say 'The cat {is, was, has, does}….' but '{I, You, We, They, The cats} {have, do}….' The only exception occurs in respect of 'be', which reserves the form 'am' for the subject 'I'. So that we could say that the pattern is observable with verbs that decompose into two forms (in the present tense, of course) (which is all verbs except 'be', which has three forms).

The facts of usage are fairly straightforward knowledge. What is not straightforward is the detection of the essential pattern even though, as I like to say, the latter stares us in the face. Teachers just keep insisting on distorting the pattern by putting noun subjects in a separate and special category. By my thesis, singular nouns fall in with 3RD PERSON SINGULAR subjects, and plural nouns fall in with the rest.

Now, it should be easier for a baby / child who is natively learning English by, in the first instance, listening to the speech of caregivers around her to detect the pattern I have described rather than the distorted, artificial rule of close-minded teachers. My pattern requires far less cognitive effort and is likely to cause less cognitive confusion.

But maybe I shouldn't bother with the teachers, for children, placed in the right language-learning social contexts, will detect the pattern for the greatest ease of learning. And part of what they will detect is that there are no plural verbs in English.



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