Learn English – Why is “a couple of…” correct grammar, while “a few of…” often isn’t

The easy answer is, no. None of the first sentences are correct, except for the first sentence in the first set.

This I have seen and heard regularly. The rest of the sets, numbers 2 and 3 are correct.

Edited: 11 December, 9:25pm EST

I have searched and searched, but have not found a single source that will allow for any wiggle room under the Most High Law of Subject-Verb Agreement. There is never considered a subject, so the subject is, of course, the collection of objects on the table, and regardless of how they are listed, it is a plural subject. I have no grammatical foot to stand on, hence Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation applies.

However, in usage, I will plead my case to Psycholinguistics, wherein research has generated theories in abundance about the architecture and mechanisms of sentence comprehension. At what point in reading does information become available to the reader? Issues such as "modular" versus "interactive" processing have caused heated theoretical rifts in the field.

Sentences are read in separate modules with which the reader interacts. but which have limited interaction with each other. While I generally hold to an interactive theory of sentence processing, in this case I am admitting that the modules are not playing well together at all. In an effort to avoid tedious squabbling, one grabs hold of the first module and deals with its behavior, whilst allowing the others to run amok. Admittedly this is poor parenting on the whole, but what's a person to do? One can listen to the cacophony only so long before becoming overwhelmed.

I place some of the blame on the misbehaving modules. Perhaps it is genetic, as a module does not come into a sentence as a tabula rasa. If the modules would cooperate and line up nicely, there would be little problem.

I summarize that the allocation of attention and the misbehavior of the modules makes this an impossible situation, one that defies the Most High Law. I throw myself on the mercy of the Court.

John Q Public is the Judge.

I wouldn’t go along with that. Locative “there” is an adverb (some grammars call it a prep) rhyming with “dare” and meaning “in or at that place”. Dummy pronoun “there” on the other hand is pronounced unstressed with a reduced vowel and used to fill the syntactic subject position in existential clauses. So there is a difference in category, pronunciation and meaning.

Historically, dummy pronoun “there” derives from the locative “there”, but it has been bleached of its locative meaning and reanalysed as a pronoun.

The point is that the dummy pronoun “there” is without doubt the syntactic subject in an existential clause, no less than “it” is the subject in an extraposed construction. This can easily be proved:

1. “There” occupies the basic subject position before the verb, e.g. “There was a nurse present”.

2. In subject-auxiliary inversion constructions it occurs after the auxiliary, e.g. “Was there a nurse present?”

3. “There” occurs as subject in interrogative tags, e.g. “There was a nurse present, wasn’t there”?

Yes, the Oxford Online dictionary does indeed give existential “there” as an adverb, but it is wrong! As usual, it is just using ‘adverb’ as a classificatory dumping ground for any word that doesn’t easily fit into one of the other word categories. The examples above demonstrate without doubt that existential “there” is a pronoun. In any case, the function of subject can’t normally be realised by an adverb.

To complete the syntax, the subject of the non-existential construction becomes a displaced subject in the existential version:

[1] "Several windows were open". [2] "There were several windows open".

In [2] “several windows” is analysed as a displaced subject (an internal complement of the verb), but it does correspond semantically to the subject in the non-existential counterpart [1].

Finally, you asked why "here" could not be the subject in:

"Here was not much snow".

"Here" is not a pronoun here, but an adverb (some call it a prep) so it can't possibly be subject. The syntactic subject in this example is "not much snow", and "here" is locative predicative complement. Think of it as "Not much snow was here". As further evidence, note that inversion would not be possible, *"Was here not much snow"?