In the office, we've been having a discussion about the grammar in a sentence and have differing opinions about what is right and what is wrong… It is a very minor issue but is still bugging me š
The sentence in question is:
A wide range of features is available.
Which sounds more natural to me if it is written as:
A wide range of features are available.
The justification for it is that the "is" is referring to the "wide range of features" as a whole rather than just the "features".
I was just about getting used to it when I decided to substitute a different word instead of "features". I just can't get my head around something like:
A wide range of sausages is available.
Further to this, if I substitute "a wide range of" with "various" then it has to be are.
Which one is right?
Edit: Thanks for all of the responses. I didn't expect to open up such a can of worms but now I understand the technicalities. I still prefer are in this case though š
Best Answer
āA wide range of features is availableā is more ātechnically correctā according to traditional prescriptive grammar, and arguably more logical.
Both forms are completely idiomatically acceptable, though; Google n-grams suggests that as of the 90ās, they were roughly equally common:
That shows just this specific example, which appears only in recent decades, but there are a host of other similar constructions, going back for centuries, and in many levels of writing, not just casual speech. So well-informed modern grammars agree, both forms are completely correct; go with whatever you feel flows best!
Edit: Actually, in contexts like yours, are is probably rather more common than that graph might suggest. Looking more closely, of the results for ārange of features isā, quite a lot are in contexts like āThe range of features is typically quite largeā¦ā, where āareā wouldnāt make sense ā the predicate unambiguously applies to the range, not to the individual features. I canāt think of a corpus search that would weed out such cases; on a very rough perusal of Google Books results, Iād guesstimate that in contexts like yours where either is idiomatic (eg āā¦a remarkable range of features is/are visibleā¦ā), the are form is maybe about twice as common as the is. (Thanks to @FumbleFingers for pointing this out in comments.)
Edit: as comments on other answers show, the two versions arenāt always interchangeable; one can certainly come up with examples where only one or the other is idiomatic. But in this specific example, both are quite fine, as the n-grams search above and more in-depth searching along similar lines illustrate.