Learn English – “There Is”/”There are” depends on plurality of the first list element or not

grammatical-numberthere-isverb-agreement

It seems I put a stick in the anthill at ELL.

Bounty assigned by outside party, two lengthy, reference-citing answers, one "-1" (awarded the bounty), one "-2", two others scored "0" and "-2" respectively, the answers suggesting one or the other is correct, 73 comments and no consensus so far – and me, as the asker, lost without a clue what to think of the answers anymore – this is no longer "Learners' Level" question, so I thought I'd bring it here and hear what the experts have to say.

Original question:

Plurality of verb depending on plurality of list elements

An edit was suggested to my sentence.

There was were an orange, some grapes, two apples and a small pile of cherries on the plate.

In my native language plurality of the verb always follows plurality of the first element on the list. There were an orange,… sounds awkward to me, no matter what follows up. My simple solution was reordering:

There were some grapes, an orange, two apples and a small pile of cherries on the plate.

But that's not the first time I faced this situation and I'd like to know what the rules of grammar say about that – was my editor overzealous or am I trying to copy rules of my language that don't apply in English?

Someone linked a related question for negatives, where the situation is more clear-cut ("There is no…"). Same applies to connection with "or" apparently, per accepted answer there. Still, nothing for "and".

It seems there is a consensus that in that if the verb goes after the list, it will be plural.

an orange, some grapes, two apples and a small pile of cherries were on the plate.

There doesn't seem to be clear consensus for:

On the plate { was | were } an orange, some grapes, two apples and a small pile of cherries

Adding more to the confusion is the abbreviated form: "There's"

One last note. In North America, at least, there is a widespread use of using a singular form like "there is" and "there was", without regard for the subject item or items, and this "there is" is often shortened to "there's":

There's three apples on the table!

Could you please clarify this mess?

Best Answer

‘The Cambridge Guide to English Usage’ deals with this pragmatically, as with much else:

Existential there couples with either singular or plural verbs (there is / there are, according to the following noun phrase) . . . This formal agreement is strictly maintained in academic writing. But in narrative and everyday writing, there is and especially there’s is found even with plural nouns . . . In conversation the combination of there’s with a plural noun is in fact more common than there are, according to the 'Longman Grammar' . . . Negative statements also seem to attract there’s . . . When a compound subject follows, there’s rather than there are is selected . . .

In such cases both formal and proximity agreement help to select the singular verb. These various uses of there’s with plural (or notionally plural) noun phrases show how the structure is working its way into the standard. It seems to be evolving into a fixed phrase, rather like the French C’est . . . serving the needs of the ongoing discourse rather than the grammar of the sentence.

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