Learn English – sentence structure that allows for things like “people looks”

grammatical-numbersyntactic-analysis

Over on meta.stackoverflow.com, a question was raised regarding the syntax of this sentence "This is what 51,000 people looks like." To me this sounds correct. My answer on the meta question may not be right, but I swear there's a rule (or set of rules) regarding this.

In case anything gets deleted –
The question:

If you follow the link: Ten. Million. Questions. Let's celebrate all we've done together, you get to the page that says:

This is what 51,000 people looks like.

The word "people" here is not used in the singular sense, and furthermore, it is preceded by a numeral, so it must be plural. The verb "looks" should be "look".

My response:

The subject of the verb (looks) is not always the noun closest to it (people). I'm not an English expert, but I believe the subject of this sentence is the word this. In other words, replacing the middle part (is that a clause?) with is what that it becomes:

This is what that looks like.

Correct as it's written, I believe. Perhaps a good question for english.stackexchange.com!

Is a sentence like "This is what 51,000 people looks like" grammatically valid? If so, what are the rules around this?

Best Answer

You can't swap "51,000 people" (a plural) for "that" (a singular).

If you swapped it for a simpler pronoun instead, it stops working:

"This is what they looks [sic] like."

But it works because of the reasons in chasly's comment. You are referring to the entire crowd of 51,000 as a single entity. "This is what a crowd of 51,000 people looks like."

You could say "Here is what 51,000 people look like", but the emphasis is on what all the people look like individually, as opposed to what the crowd looks like.