Learn English – Subject-verb agreement with “what-clauses”

subject-verb-agreement

Usually the 'What-clause' is considered to be a singular subject. I am under the impression that it takes a singular verb even if the predicate is plural, but I may be wrong. Examples:

What we need is not protests. What we really need is new generations
able to voice their opinions. What we need is Chinese men and women
eloquent in foreign languages.

Please correct or confirm.

Best Answer

Although what we need are is possible in some cases, in this case it's a poor choice. Why? Because all three what we needs refers to the same thing, and that thing is either singular or plural, not both. It's quite strange to refer to it first as though it's plural, then as though it's singular.

The best choice is to use is all three times:

What we need isn't protests.
What we need is new generations able to voice their opinions.
What we need is Chinese men and women who are eloquent speakers of foreign languages.

The parallelism is stronger rhetorically in any case.

Besides which, is is the more common choice overall. Take a look at this chart of four n-grams in the Google Books corpus:

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From this chart, it seems that is is eight times more common than are; and specifically with negatives, it's ten times more common. So both occur, but is is clearly favored.

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