From: hlirg@alf.uib.no (Roger Greenwald)
Subject: Re: what has happened to "ascribe" ?
Keywords: number, contraction
Organization: University of Bergen, Norway
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 92 03:22:47 GMT

In article <5689@osc.COM> Joe Keane <jgk@osc.com> writes:
>In article <RMUGELE.92Jul24082955@oasun1.oracle.com> rmugele@oracle.com
>(Robert Mugele) writes:
>>I tend to agree with this last comment.  It seems to me that "there is"
>>and "there are" are moving toward an idomatic usage where they merge and
>>number is no longer significant.  I see this as analagous to the Spanish
>>word "hay" which has the meanings "there is" and "there are".
>
>I have a sort of alternative theory that "there's" has become an acceptable
>contraction for "there are", most likely because "there're" is awkward to
>pronounce and easily confused with "their" or "they're".  So i wonder how much
>people who use "there's" with plural objects would also use "there is" in the
>same place, or whether most of them would switch to "there are" if they're not
>using the contraction.

1. Your "alternative" theory seems to me to say exactly what Mugele says.
2. You mean " 'there's' with plural *subjects* "
3. I agree that "There's" is easier to say in contracted form than "There're"
and that this has no doubt influenced speech.
4. Here is a bit of text to address the question of usage in writing.
From _The Examined Life_, by Robert Nozick (New York: Touchstone, 1989),
p. 64. (As a philosopher, Nozick is accustomed to trying to write as
precisely as he can; he states that this book went through many
revisions; and he discusses at one point the way T.S. Eliot went about
revising infelicities of style in his essays.)
"To speak of _conversations_ here does not mean that the sole
(nonreproductive) purpose of sex is communication. There is also
excitement and bodily pleasure, desired for themselves. Yet these
too are also important parts of the conversation...."

Note that "themselves" shows that Nozick thinks of "excitement and
bodily pleasure" as plural (and I see no other way of interpreting
this pair, since it is clear in the context that "excitement"
refers to a _mental/emotional_ state). "these" and "are" confirm
the plurality. Yet Nozick writes "There is," not "There are."
I would argue that this indicates that he is no longer aware of
"is" here as a VERB; that the phrase "There is" is being used as
a sort of presentational sign (like a colon). (I do not think
he would write "Excitement and bodily pleasure exists"). My
statement does not contradict the view that "there is" is becoming
a singular/plural verb like Spanish "hay"; rather, it focuses
on the changed perception or "feel" of the phrase that may have
allowed this to happen. In general, I think, the use of verbs
in English has declined in the last 15 years or so, as the use of nouns
has increased (this has probably been established by statistical studies).
The frequent use of the "There is / There are" construction
coincides with greater use of nouns.
>
>In any case, it is an idiomatic format, and there's no reason to assume that
>the verb must agree in number with the object (or do you call it the subject).
>I'd have a hard time believing that "there" is a noun.
>
What do you mean, there is no reason to "assume" the verb must agree
with the subject? In writing there are very good reasons! (One is
that this is a basic convention of the language; another is that
it makes it considerably easier, in many sentences, to understand
what is being talked about, who or what performs the action specified by
the verb, which noun a pronoun that starts a clause refers back to, etc.)
You say it is an idiom (above you say "acceptable contraction") as if that
automatically solves the problem of what to do about it in standard
written language. An idiom is by definition "accepted" in the sense
commonly used and understood. That doesn't make it accepted in
written language. "There is" with plural subject would seem to be
more and more common in writing; but I wouldn't say it's so common
yet as to be generally accepted. It might take 30 or 40 years
to replace "There are" entirely, if it ever does so.
-- 
Roger Greenwald
Greenwald@hf.uib.no (address valid only until 10 August 1992)
Xref: sparky sci.lang:6192 sci.classics:600 sci.anthropology:647 talk.philosophy.misc:1506 sci.philosophy.meta:1385 rec.arts.books:13483