Learn English – What form the verb after besides

Although there are many people that claim that "none" and "neither" should always take the singular form, it's always sounded odd to me, so I decided to dig into it a bit further.

For example, here is an Ngram of "none of us is" / "none of us are":

In this case, we can clearly see that "none of us are" - i.e. the supposedly "ungrammatical" form of the sentence was vastly more popular until roughly 1880. In 1880 or so "none of us is" began to take hold, and in the 1920s there was a steep decline in the use of "none of us are" - perhaps in response to overzealous copy editors enforcing the so called rule.

Most interesting is what's happened since the 1990s, where "none of us are" has shot back to prominence, leading to the fact that "none of us are" is now the dominant form again.

As suggested by snailplane, here's some interesting additional reading which seems to confirm my opinion that "none/neither should take the singular" is a wholly invented rule:

• http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/with-malice-toward-none.html

• http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/01/08/none-is-none-are-grammar-according-to-clarkson/

As a native speaker, I've always just gone with choosing the verb as if "none" or "neither" was not taking part in the verb choice.

The sentences are too long. -> None of the sentences are too long

A or B is the correct answer -> Neither A nor B is the correct answer.

These are examples of reduced adverbial clauses,in which the subject and BE are deleted.

While we were exploring the paths of the program, we established ...
Any method which covers ... while it is avoiding path enumeration ...

This reduction is only permitted under two conditions:

1. The verb of the clause must be in a progressive form, or rewritable as a progressive form.

   ^✲While explored the paths of the program ...
   ^✲... while avoids path enumeration ...

2. The subject of the clause must be the same as that of the main clause which it modifies, or a pronoun which refers to it.

   ^✲While exploring the paths of the program, a natural partitioning was established ...

   This implies that it was the partitioning which was exploring. The technical term is dangling modifier—‘dangling’ because the clause ‘hangs loose’, not firmly attached to an appropriate subject. Note that the unreduced clause is OK, because the differing subjects are distinguished:

   ^OKWhile we were exploring ..., a natural partition was established ...

^✲ marks an utterance as unacceptable