Learn English – Subject–verb agreement — two schools of thought

american-englishgrammatical-numberquantifiersthere-isverb-agreement

I wrote a sentence for our web site that was submitted for proofreading. The proofreader "corrected" my sentence. I asked how sure he was that he was correct and that I was incorrect. He explained that there are two schools of thought on what's correct and he chose his way as the right way.

I suggested that there were certainly two schools of thought: the right way and the wrong way.

  1. School One:

    There is a large number of companies.

  2. School Two:

    There are a large number of companies.

Can you tell me which is the correct school of thought and why?

Update. I think I should be able to reverse the sentence and still have it makes sense. When I attempt that, it works only with one of these sentences:

The number of companies is large.

The number of companies are large.

This suggests to me that the correct sentence uses "is". Does this make any difference?

Best Answer

Garner in Garner's Modern English Usage (2003) belongs to School Two. He writes (p559):

A. ... but a number of is quite correctly paired with a plural noun and a plural verb, as in there are a number of reasons ... .
This construction is correct because of the linguistic principle known as SYNESIS, which allows some constructions to control properties such as number according to their meaning rather than strict syntactical rules. Since the meaning of a number of things is many things (or several things), and since some things is plural, the verb must be plural. [...]
B. The number of. When the phrase is used with the definite article the, everything changes. Now, instead of talking about the multiple things, we're talking about the number itself, which is singular: the number of students planning to attend college is steadily rising.
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