Oddness When You Start a Sentence with "There Is"

mason00

http://grammar.quickanddirtytips ... -with-there-is.aspx

Oddness When You Start a Sentence with “There is”
A listener reader named Joe wants to know whether he should say “There is a couch and a coffee table in the room” or “There are a couch and coffee table in the room.”

His question brings up an interesting quick about word “there.”

One of the most common ways to recognize the English sentence is to put the subject first and the verb second. That’s how it works in sentence such as “I cooked” and “Pat threw up.” The pronoun “I” and the noun “Pat” are the subjects and they comes first, and the verbs “cooked” and “threw up” come second. We’re all very comfortable with sentences that use this pattern (even if we’re not all comfortable with my cooking).

The word there can both function as pronoun and noun, and even though “there” comes first and followed by a verb in sentence such as “There are a couch and coffee table in the room,” “there” isn’t the subject, and that’s why Joe is confused.

What is an Expletive Sentence?
Sentences beginning with “there are” and “there is” are using a different kind of structure called and expletive construction. You can get a sense of how expletive sentences are different from the more common subject-verb sentence structure because if you swap in another noun for the word “there,” the meaning changes.

For example, let’s create a similar sentence with different noun in place of “there.” Instead of “There is a couch and coffee table in the room,” let’s try “Bob is a couch and coffee table in the room.” The new word “Bob” is clearly the subject and drives our choice of verb. I’m making some wired statement of Bob actually being a couch and coffee table, and the verb choice is clear to native English speakers. You’d never be tempted to say “Bob are a couch and coffee table.”

But when the sentence starts with “there” instead of “Bob”, it’s easier to get confused. You think “there” is the subject, but you also sense that something is different or wrong. In the expletive sentence, the pronoun “there” is just filling up space. It’s kind of hanging out pointing to what’s going on the other part of the sentence. It’s not the subject. The subject is actually “a couch and a coffee table.”

It’s a compound subject since it has two nouns connected by the word “and,” which makes it plural, but it’s still a subject; and it’s always the subject of sentence that drives your verb choice, even if the subject isn’t at the beginning of sentence.

Now that you know the subject is “a couch and a coffee table” and that it’s plural, it’s easy to choose the right verb: “are.” Plural subject makes plural verbs. (The subjects are underlining in the following examples)
Cookies are good. Trees are tall. A couch and a coffee table are in the room. There are a couch and coffee table in the room.

Is It Bad to Start a Sentence with “There is”?
Did you see what I did in the last two sentences? In the first one, I used the common sentence order and put the subject first:
A couch and a coffee table are in the room.
In the second one, I flipped it around and added a “There are” at the beginning to make an expletive sentence:
There are a couch and a coffee table in the room.
Although I believe people often take this approach to extremes, many sources say that expletive sentences are bad style and should be avoid, and you can see from the examples of how easy it is to get rid of the word “there” and rephrase the sentence. If you want to get wild, you can even use a more descriptive verb and write, “A couch and a coffee table sit in the room,” or “A couch and a coffee table grace the room.”

When you’re editing your work and finding a sentence that stars with word “there are” or “there is,” see whether rewording your sentence make it better. Often it does.

How to Determine Subject-Verb Agreement in A Expletive Sentence
And if you decide to keep the word “there is” or “there are” at the beginning of sentences, the tricky to figuring out what verb to use is finding out the real subject of the sentence.

Web Bonus
Rewrite these sentences to avoid expletive construction:
1. There is water in the lake. Water is in the lake.
2. There is no historical precedent in this case. Historical precedent is not in this case.
3. There are many theories about the bacteria’s origin. Many theories are about bacteria’s origin.
4. There are five students who want to be class president. Five students want to be class president.
5. There is ice cream in freezer. Ice cream is in the freezer.
6. It is hamburger makes me droll. Hamburger makes me droll.
7. It is Bob who thinks he is a couch and a chair. Bob thinks he is a couch and a chair.

mason00

May be a good way to improve your English.

1. Listen to Grammar Girl
2. Open word or any editor applications with spell/grammar checker
3. Read the sentence and then type it down, not word by word but sentence by sentence or part by part
4. No need to be exactly copy. Rewrite is better; at least it should pass the spell/grammar check
5. Post your work here
6. Any advices are welcome

cynthiawu

原帖由 刘收庚 于 18-11-2011 03:54 发表

                               
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