A few days ago, the Language Log bat signal went up over Livejournal, where mrs_cake wrote ("This is the weather of our discontent"):
Now, forward my trusty grammarians. On Language Log, my bible for all things language, I saw the following in an entry I came across while following linkage - thus I will never find it again. Sorry I can't reference this properly. Anyway, this was the linguistic stone I stumbled over (out of context I'm afraid):
There are a bunch of reasons for this.
I'm sure you see where I'm headed. I have some issues with singular vs plural (but I admit to subscribing to the 'singular they' school of thought wholeheartedly). Now. I would use "are" here because it sounds better (don't hit me). However, is there some rule that governs the use of singular vs plural "bunch"?
The Corpus that is Googles yields: "there is a bunch" = 184,000 / "there are a bunch" = 988,000 results. Usage figures would indicate that bunch is used with the plural much more often than with the singular.
While I'm at it, what about "number"? I'd always say "There is a large number of reasons". Is this correct?
Modern standard usage is heavily in favor of "there are" with noun phrases like "a bunch of" and "a number of", as mrs_cake observes and we confirm below. But there are a bunch of interesting reasons why mrs_cake might be puzzled about this. It's at the intersection of uncertainty about what verb forms to use with subjects like "a <collection-word> of Xs", and uncertainty about the developing indeclinability of "there's". So nobody better hit her, OK? Her preferred usage is the standard one, and at the same time, her ambivalence about it is well founded and rational.
The cited string {"are a bunch of reasons"} doesn't seem to occur in the Language Log archive's 4,000+ posts. However, {"are a bunch of"} occurs six times. (The six bunches in question are "flaming homosexuals", "factors", "uncultured yahoos", "ugly chain-whipping mofos", "responses", and "competing landscape-oriented ape-brain simulators for Mac OS X", indicated the breadth of our coverage as well as the context's informality and apparently negative affect; but I digress.) Three of these examples are in the frame "there are a bunch of".
The string {"is a bunch of"} occurs three times. In this case, the bunches are "sissies", "little words that Paglia probably couldn't care less about", and "pompous turkeys". Three out of three are negative this time -- but none of them are involve the frame "there is a bunch of". And the contracted alternative {"there's a bunch of"} doesn't occur at all.
As mrs_cake points out, counts out on the web are consistent with ours in preferring "there are a bunch of Xs" to "there is a bunch of Xs". But she omitted the common contracted option, "there's", which is overall about three times commoner than "there is" in this frame, and substantially boosts the proportion of bunches with (apparent!) singular agreement:
| Yahoo | MSN | Language Log | ||
| there are a bunch of | 918,000 |
917,000 |
162,034 |
3 |
| there is a bunch of | 167,000 |
150,000 |
24,658 |
0 |
| there are / there is | 5.5 |
6.1 |
6.6 |
|
| Percent is | 15.4% |
14.0% |
13.2% |
|
| there're a bunch of | 594 |
869 |
703 |
0 |
| there's a bunch of | 416,000 |
492,000 |
82,907 |
0 |
| there are / there's | 2.2 |
1.9 |
2.0 |
|
| there('re| are) / there('s| is) | 1.6 |
1.4 |
1.5 |
|
| Percent is or 's | 38.8% |
41.1% |
39.8% |
There's a bunch of different things going on here. The first is the question of whether "a bunch of Xs" is singular or plural. In modern standard usage, it's overwhelmingly treated as plural. In terms of Google counts, the following examples make the point:
things |
people |
|
| a bunch of __ is | 147 |
1,910 |
| a bunch of __ are | 4,150 |
53,400 |
| proportion "is" | 3.4% |
3.4% |
| "bunch" as subject in sample | 2/20=10% |
4/20=20% |
| corrected proportion of "is" | 0.4% |
0.7% |
[The reason for the "corrected proportion" in the table above is that in most examples of "a bunch of Xs is", bunch is not the subject of is. Thus
blind juggling for a bunch of people is hard
what kind of person would think that pretending to kill a bunch of people is funny?But there are a few examples of where bunch is really the subject, e.g.
besides a trip to Boston next weekend a bunch of people is going to Delaware in June.
the sort of ambiance that enriches the side-conversations that ensue when a bunch of people is making sandwichesSo I estimated the percentage by checking the top 20 hits -- I wish Google would give you the option to see 20 random hits! -- and corrected accordingly. The correction is probably not very accurate, but the whole thing is an order-of-magnitude exercise anyhow...]
But the second question is what's going on with "there is" vs. "there's".
There's a significant tendency for "is" to increase relative to "are" in the frame "there __ a bunch of Xs" compared to "a bunch of Xs __". However, the big news is the widespread usage of the contracted form "there's a bunch of Xs":
things |
people |
places | folks | songs | reasons | |
| There is a bunch of __ | 210 |
762 |
38 |
57 |
22 |
45 |
| There are a bunch of __ | 26,000 |
47,000 |
694 |
680 |
292 |
9,280 |
| There's a bunch of __ | 871 |
20,500 |
179 |
233 |
126 |
220 |
| are / is | 124 |
62 |
18 |
12 |
13 |
206 |
| are / 's | 30 |
2.3 |
3.9 |
2.9 |
2.3 |
42 |
| proportion "is"+"'s" | 4% |
31% |
23% |
30% |
34% |
2.8% |
We should note in passing that there seems to be quite a bit of word-to-word variation in usage here, among various values of X in "there's a bunch of Xs". And a quick check suggests that the pattern is consistent across search engines, though the details differ -- thus comparing things to people, usage shifts in a major way from "there are a bunch of ___" to "there's a bunch of __".
| Yahoo | MSN | ||
| There is a bunch of things | 210 |
383 |
160 |
| There are a bunch of things | 26,000 |
13,100 |
4,192 |
| There's a bunch of things | 871 |
1,950 |
1,325 |
| Percent is - are - 's | 0.8 - 96 - 3.2 | 2.5 - 84.9 - 12.6 | 2.8 - 73.9 - 23.3 |
| There is a bunch of people | 762 |
1,650 |
814 |
| There are a bunch of people | 47,000 |
41,600 |
6,562 |
| There's a bunch of people | 20,500 |
24,500 |
3,702 |
| Percent is - are - 's | 1.1 - 68.9 - 30 | 2.4 - 61.4 - 36.2 | 7.4 - 59.2 - 33.4 |
But the main point is that overall, "there's + <plural noun phrase>" has a different usage pattern than "there is + <plural noun phrase>". Arnold Zwicky and I discussed this a couple of years ago -- When "there's" isn't "there is" (9/1/2005). Arnold put it this way:
"there is" + <plural noun phrase> is indeed nonstandard (and somewhat more common in the south and south midlands than elsewhere, I believe -- I'm away from my sources on this today) , but "there's" + <plural noun phrase> should really be characterized, in current English, as merely informal/colloquial, rather than nonstandard.
A theory that fits the facts, I think, is that there's is on its way to be re-analyzed as an indeclinable form like French il y a or Spanish hay. For most people, it co-exists with the older there is/are pattern, as an informal/colloquial variant. The smaller increase in the proportion of "there is + <plural noun phrase>", compared to "<plural noun phrase> is", is presumably due to uncertainty about how to spell the indeclinable form.
And bunch, of course, is already informal/colloquial, so "there's a bunch of __" fits nicely. And talking about "reasons" is arguably less colloquial than talking about "people", so that might be why "there's a bunch of reasons" is so much less common, relatively speaking, than "there's a bunch of people" or "there's a bunch of places". Unfortunately, I don't have any plausible story to tell about why "there's a bunch of things" is also frequentistically impoverished.
What about the tendency of Language Loggers to treat X in "a bunch of Xs" as negatively evaluated? (Actually, in most of the cited examples, we're attributing the negative evaluation to someone else, by means of free indirect speech -- a topic for another post.)
This appears to be a rhetorical peculiarity of our own, not a general characteristic of the language. On the web, there are bunches of nutjobs, knuckleheads, masochistic motherfuckers, and useless truths, but the web also offers equally large bunches of imperiled children, really good liberal bloggers, excellent free choices, and applications that are cool.
As for the grammatical number of a number of and the general class of similar expressions, it would take several separate posts to do it justice. But I'll note in passing that {"there are a number of"} occurs 31 times in the Language Log archive, while {"there is a number of"} doesn't occur at all. And if we ask the LION archive about usage in the literary canon, broadly construed, we get the following distribution:
| Poetry | Drama | Prose | |
| there is a number of | 2 |
1 |
4 |
| there are a number of | 11 |
14 |
20 |
The two poetic hits for "there is a number of" date from 1589 and 1647. The dramatic example is from 1783, and the prose examples are from 1771, 1817, 1838, and 1850.
The poetic hits for "there are a number of" date from 1810, 1840, 1937, 1937, 1991, 1991, 1994, 1994, 1996, 1997 (though the two 1937 items are from modern footnotes in an edition of Swift's poems, and thus not strictly speaking poetry at all).
The prose examples of "there are a number of" start in 1761 with Charles Batteux's A Course of the Belles Letters:
There are a number of other actors, whose parts, though not so considerable as the foregoing ones, are nevertheless each of them characterised, sometimes by an historical stroke, at others by a particular and personal incident, or circumstance remarkably interesting.
They continue through Hazlitt's 1818 Lectures on the English Poets:
There are a number of good lines and good thoughts in the Cooper's Hill.
John Keats' 1819 letter to George and Georgiana Keats:
This Winchester is a place tolerably well suited to me; there is a fine Cathedral, a College, a Roman-Catholic Chapel, a Methodist do, an independent do,---and there is not one loom or any thing like manufacturing beyond bread & butter in the whole City. There are a number of rich Catholic‹s› in the place. It is a respectable, ancient aristocratical place---and moreover it contains a nunnery.
William Makepeace Thakeray's 1848 Vanity Fair:
THE kind reader must please to remember ---while the army is marching from Flanders, and, after its heroic actions there, is advancing to take the fortifications on the frontiers of France, previous to an occupation of that country,---that there are a number of persons living peaceably in England who have to do with the history at present in hand, and must come in for their share of the chronicle.
And Mark Twain's 1873 The Guilded Age:
There are a number of prarie dogs running around.
A few more contemporary counts of usage in somewhat authoritative sources:
| "there are a number of" | "there is a number of" | Percent "is" | |
| Google News | 3,970 |
40 |
1.0% |
| NYT Archive (since 1981) |
2,647 |
1 |
0.03% |
| The Guardian (online search) |
1,729 |
10 |
0.6% |
| The Atlantic (1857 to present) |
35 |
0 |
0% |
So mrs_cake's preference for "there is a large number of reasons" puts her very much in the modern minority, though more in tune with the fashions of earlier times. But again, no one should hit her -- this is a word-rage-free zone.
[Update -- John Cowan writes:
J.R.R. Tolkien once received a letter (addressed to "any Professor of English Language") asking him about the rectitude of "A large number of walls is/are being built", and saying that "big money" was riding on the issue. He answered, of course, that you can say what you like. His original reply is not in print AFAIK, but a letter to someone else referencing it is in The Letters of JRRT.
]
Posted by Mark Liberman at January 13, 2007 10:37 AM