IS or ARE? "The only thing that I want you to hit right now IS/ARE the books"

Question

In this sentence, which is the right word?

The only thing that I want you to hit right now is/are the books.

Answer 1

The verb always follows the subject, and the Subject here is "The only thing" (singular). Because of that, the correct verb is "is", regardless of whatever comes after the verb.

Answer 2

Short Answer

I'm going to provide support for a more moderate and, I believe, more accurate answer. This Short Answer section will give my fundamental position and the next Detailed Answer section will provide supporting details.

While most educational prescriptivist grammar texts (self-proclaimed "correct" grammars, including undergraduate and EFL/ESL texts) still mandate subject-verb agreement (which is a good rule for the vast majority of cases) the descriptivist ("linguistic, actual speech studies") view should not be totally discounted in this case. I think the OP's sentence is just about perfectly midway between the two extremes of agreeing with the grammatical subject vs. the logical subject. With the OP's sentence, both the plural and the singular form can (statistically) sound just fine to many native English speakers. In addition to the next Detailed Answer section, also see Bock and Miller's seminal paper on this phenomenon, "Broken Agreement" (Cognitive Psychology 23, 45-93, 1991).

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Detailed Answer

First, @mohomad's answer is defensible prescriptively. But that defense is, at least in part, by definition because many prescriptive texts (especially older ones) prescribe it as so.¹ This old rule is not absolute when one accounts for some descriptive linguistic scenarios. (See Difference between prescriptive and descriptive grammar.) So let's review the prescriptive answer. The OP's sentence reduces to:

• The thing is the books.

The reduced sentence makes the subject/complement plurality disagreement more obvious and even cognitively disconcerting. But given "a choice", the subject is obviously singular, and so should be the verb, as the following sentence demonstrates:

• The thing I want is the books.

The above sentence is expanded with just enough semantics to eliminate much of the cognitive dissonance while retaining the natural grammatical agreement of subject and verb. But now consider the following sentences, in which the plural ("are") form can sound fine to many people:

• The only thing that I want you to hit right now are those books.
• What I want for my birthday, if it's OK with you, are those books.
• ...the only thing left for me to read are the books on my shelf. (Actual comment found at http://www.thesepaperhearts.com/2014/05/discussion-reading-preferences-new-old-books.)

Above, the plural word 'those' helps make the plural form of the verb sound much more natural.

This phenomenon is called proximity concord (aka proximity agreement) and is found in actual spoken and written English (even "slipping" into formal registers on occasion). When there's a plausible shift in plurality and the phrasing distances a copular verb (such as "to be") from the grammatical subject, the verb can sound more natural when matching the closer, logical subject. This phenomenon is more pronounced as the verb gets further from the grammatical subject, the verb gets closer to the subject complement, and any intermediary phrases include pluralities like 'those'. But this phenomenon can occur even with very short sentences:

• There's some boxes left on the porch.
• There are some boxes left on the porch. (Santorini and Kroch, The syntax of natural language: An online introduction using the Trees program.)

In fact, Santorini and Kroch suggest both prescriptive and descriptive rules:

In a sentence containing both the singular expletive subject 'there' and a plural logical subject:

• Prescriptive rule: The verb should agree in number with the logical subject.
• Descriptive rule: The verb can agree in number with either the expletive subject or the logical subject. [Emphasis added by me. CoolHandLouis]

But the OP's sentence uses 'the books' instead of 'those books'. This has some balancing effect of nullifying the proximity concord effect. Ultimately, there will be individual preferences and, in fact, I have my own preference (unspoken); but that's not important here. I believe the sentence will (statistically) read fine to many native English speakers using either the plural or the singular--especially if unprompted regarding the issue of plurality.

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^{1. Prescriptive texts should eventually (will eventually) be updated to better model language based on modern linguistic concepts, including notional concord and proximal concord in addition to the traditional grammatical concord. In the future, the current prescriptive argument ("VERB ALWAYS AGREES WITH SUBJECT!") will include the exceptions ("except when they don't").}

Answer 3

The verb should be in agreement with the subject. This website has some examples.

Thus, the correct way to say it would be:

The only thing that I want you to hit right now is the books.

Also, if "the books" is the subject, then it would be:

The books are the only things that I want you to hit right now.

Answer 4

Yes I agree with Eric. Here we are using "The only thing" which must be followed by "is". And also if you read a lot you might notice that "The only thing" is followed by "is".

Some examples could be:

"The only thing I want to hear from Iraq war architects is an apology". Harry Ried

"The only thing I want to learn from you is this: Did you receive the Spirit by doing the works of the law or by believing what you heard?" Source

Answer 5

Most English speakers accept the use of "to be" to equate a singular with a plural.

So, if you're sure that you want to equate "the books" (plural) with "the only thing" (singular), then you'd say "The only thing I want you to hit right now is the books".

Or with subject and object the other way around, "The books are the only thing I want you to hit right now".

If you're pedantic, though, then the safe option is to change to "The only things I want you to hit right now are the books". This is clumsier, but easier to defend as "correct" because it avoids that singular/plural equality.

Answer 6

'Is', but I'd suggest making the entire sentence more grammatically pleasing...

The only things I want you to hit right now are the books

Following grammatical correctness is okay, but ensuring there is no possible way to argue that the sentence is grammatically incorrect is better. They'll be read/heard better by more people.

Answer 7

Ok, I must reiterate what another poster said. In this specific phrase, "the books" is not a physical set of "books" but the concept of studying, which is singular, so the correct verb would be "is".

Answer 8

To be grammatically correct, you would want to make the conjugated form of the verb "to be" agrees with "thing(s)" and "book(s)." The sentence will then be "The only things that I want you to hit are the books."

Answer 9

Consider this sentence:

(1) People who are distracted while driving {are/*is} a big problem.

Clearly, the verb follows the subject. But:

(2) A big problem {is/are} people who are distracted while driving.

In the rearranged sentence, you have a choice of which verb to use; either choice is euphonic (sounds good).

The rules are not so clear-cut; for instance:

(3) You {are/is*} the one I want.

(4) The one I want {are/is*} you.

Also:

(5) Dangerous {*is/are} those who are distracted while driving.

This sentence (5) helps explain why (2) sounds good with either is or are. Example (2) is ambiguous. It can be seen as a rearrangement of a sentence whose subject is people, and it can also be seen as a sentence in plain form whose subject is a big problem. In (5) there is no ambiguity because dangerous is an adjective and so it cannot be regarded as a subject; the subject is those, and so the choice of verb is restricted to are.

The underlying rule seems to be that the plurality of the verb goes with the subject; however, identifying what is the subject can be ambiguous.

Answer 10

actually "thing" should be changed to "things" to match the plurality of "books". So the question you pose has no answer because the original sentence is grammatically incorrect.