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Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Criminal Sentence 603: Attached to Subject-Verb Agreement

From a comment about a blog post:

"Characters are what attaches me to a story."

Um. Subject-verb agreement is what attaches me!

2 comments:

AgataL said...

Hello! I have some doubts here: isn't the subject-verb agreement right in this case? The subject "Characters" is plural, and so is the verb. As for "attaches", it agrees with WHAT, which is singular by default. The sentence may sound a bit awkward, but is it really incorrect? (I'm asking as a non-native speaker of English.)

The Sentence Sleuth said...

I believe that "what" in this case is plural (you could replace "what" with "the things that"), so a plural verb is necessary. Anyone else have a thought?