In our textbook we have the correct answer to two separate questions.
One reads "We have someone clean the house".
The other one reads "Someone cleans the house".
My teacher assures me that both of these forms are grammatically correct, but I don't know why. Could someone kindly explain it to me? Thank you.
Best Answer
‘Someone’ like ‘anyone’, ‘everyone’ and ‘no one’ are a group of what’s known as indefinite pronouns and are always singular and require singular verbs. This is why “Someone cleans the house” is a correct and natural sounding sentence.
However, there is this idiomatic construction: to have + someone+ do something (infinitive without to) which means 'to get somebody to do something'. The verb in this case is actually an infinitive, which cannot have -s, -ed, -es or -ing added to the end. Therefore your teacher is correct in that both sentences are grammatically sound.