Learn English – “who doesn’t” vs. “who don’t”

contractionsgrammaticalityinflectional-morphologynegationverb-agreement

What is the difference between "There will be users who doesn't buy something" and "There will be users who don't buy something"? Are they both grammatically correct?

Best Answer

It's users, plural. The verb has to agree. Users buy X. Users don't buy Y. Users who don't buy Z. Saying "users who doesn't buy something" would be ungrammatical.

Edit: I took the "something" in your example to be a placeholder for a product name. If that is not the case, i.e. if what you actually want to say is that there will be users who will buy nothing at all, then, as JoseK points out, you should be using "anything" rather than "something". That's because anything is a negative polarity item, while something is a positive one. So, to sum it up:

  • There will be users who don't buy X.
  • There will be users who don't buy anything.
  • There will be users who buy nothing.
  • * There will be users who doesn't buy something. (Ungrammatical.)
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