Timeline for The thing that scares me the most are the little oranges in its stomach
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
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| Jan 12, 2016 at 17:31 | comment | added | Ben Kovitz | More to the point, grammatical errors involving subject-verb agreement are fairly common in practice, especially where there are two nouns that superficially seem to command agreement with the verb. This is an excellent question because it focuses on a common kind of grammatical error—which is truly valuable for a learner to know about. Textbooks seldom talk about this kind of error, and indeed you can't figure it out on the basis of rules alone. You can only understand what's going on through experience, familiarity with clichés, empathy for speakers engaged in everyday sloppy speech, etc. | |
| Jan 12, 2016 at 17:22 | comment | added | Ben Kovitz | I'm writing tersely because these are comments. Some more info is in my answer. Authorities and strict rules seldom describe the real conventions by which people communicate through the language or how speakers think about sentence. E.g. style guides recommend against clichés because people use them for emphasis so much, they lose their power. Inversion for emphasis is very strong but also very rare (which is partly why it's so strong). The cliché of "the thing that ---- the most is ----" communicates by its familiarity, and the singular verb is needed to give "the most" maximum impact. | |
| Jan 12, 2016 at 17:05 | comment | added | Gary Botnovcan | What I don't understand is why you'd claim a stock phrase or cliché produces emphasis. Style guides consistently recommend avoiding them precisely because tired phrasing cannot produce either emphasis or clarity. What you don't seem to understand are that complements often precede the copula (cf. "a merry band are we" and "blessed are the meek") and that Sally is reacting not to the oranges themselves but to their placement and use. Had Sally let the verb agree with "things", the latter fact would not be evident in the sentence itself. Choice of subject is meaningful. | |
| Jan 10, 2016 at 22:06 | comment | added | Ben Kovitz | If you still think that the "oranges" sentence uses the "a god am I" inversion, could you add something more to your answer about why? Right now, it seems that you've run off on an unexplained analogy with something unrelated. What's the connection? | |
| Jan 10, 2016 at 22:02 | comment | added | Ben Kovitz | The inversion that you describe is indeed a strong form of emphasis. But I don't think that's what's happening in the "little oranges" sentence. I think most people hear that as an error, not as emphasis. People often hem and haw while or right after saying it. Understanding it as inversion would misunderstand the emphasis, which comes from the stock phrase "the thing that ---- the most is ----", which requires a singular verb for the emphasis to make sense. If "oranges" were the simple subject, you would say "things" to agree with it, spoiling the emphatic phrase. | |
| Jan 4, 2016 at 3:26 | vote | accept | Makoto Kato | ||
| Jan 11, 2016 at 1:35 | |||||
| Jan 1, 2016 at 19:05 | history | answered | Gary Botnovcan | CC BY-SA 3.0 |