Look Forward To

The highlighted (The New Paper, 31 May 2013) is wrong.

The writer has obviously misanalysed the to as being part of an infinitive, i.e. to study – an error that is exceedingly common in Singapore, even among members of the teaching profession.

It is worth remembering that there are two types of to: one is a preposition (e.g. Jane went to Munich last month); the other helps us form to-infinitives (e.g. to travel).

The to in the highlighted portion of the article is in fact a preposition: it belongs to the multiword verb look forward to, often also called a phrasal-prepositional verb because it has the structure verb+adverb+preposition.

As is required of prepositions, look forward to is followed by a noun, or something functioning as a noun, in this case the clause (more specifically, a noun clause) studying at the polytechnic ... supposed to start yesterday. If I am asked ‘What was he looking forward to?’ the answer would be ‘Studying at the polytechnic ...’, not ‘Study at the polytechnic...’.

Police Is/Are

A short article (Straits Times Interactive, 30 May 2013), but one containing quite a few errors (or non-standard usages, if you will).

First, molest in Standard English can only be a verb; in Singapore English, however, it is both a noun and a verb. The standard noun form required here was molestation.

Secondly, police in Standard English is a collective noun that is treated as plural; hence, the opening line of the article should have read The police are investigating ....

There should also be commas before the relative clauses who was accused of molesting a student and which happened on April 5, because they are non-defining (or non-restrictive).

Finally, the modifier by the student is badly placed, making it seem as if it belongs in a noun phrase inappropriate behaviour by the student. Placing it after the verb accused would be an improvement, giving us the much clearer The lecturer had been accused by the student of inappropriate behaviour.

Who/Whom

The highlighted relative pronoun is wrong; it should be who (Sunday Times, 19 May 2013).

The incorrect whom seems to be the result of the author mistaking it for the object of I think (i.e. *I think whom), when in fact it is merely parenthetical. The relative clause is therefore saying who (I thought) were quite the perfect Hollywood couple.

Why, then, the subject pronoun who rather than the object pronoun whom? Because who is the subject of the relative clause: it stands in for Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, so the relative clause is in effect saying Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were quite the perfect Hollywood couple.

Years Old

The highlighted (Straits Times Interactive, 17 May 2013) should not be hyphenated.

It is hyphenated only if it is used atributively; that is, it comes before a noun, e.g. a 38-year-old footballer. Note also the singular unit of measure in this case, i.e. year (not years).

Otherwise, there are no hyphens, and the unit of measure is plural; e.g. The footballer is 38 years old.

Criteria/Criterion

Two mistakes in the Straits Times Interactive (16 May 2013).

The first highlighted word, criteria, is plural, so the singular criterion should have been used instead: one new criterion. (Another common singular/plural pair is phenomenon/phenomena.)

The second is a more glaring mistake: the authorities is plural, so the highlighted verb should have been are. The noun phrase the authorities is the subject of its relative clause (i.e. (which/that) the authorities are considering), so the verb needs to agree with it.

Railway

This is one I cannot be absolutely sure about, but I suspect the highlighted verb ought to be sits rather than sit since the noun railway as used in this sense is noncount, hence singular (Straits Times, 16 June 2011).  Similarly, we would say Six cups of coffee a day is excessive, not are.

18 Years Old

Make it 18 years old, without any hyphens (New Paper, 9 August 2011). 

The rule to remember here is that if the compound adjective comes before the noun, it should be hyphenated (as if to show it functions as a single adjective), and that the unit of measure is singular (year): an 18-year-old student. 

However, if it comes after a linking verb (in this case be), it loses the hyphens and the unit of measure becomes plural: He may only be 18 years old.  (Pedants might also point out that only should precede 18 rather than be, since it modifies the age rather than the verb.)

If used as a noun in its own right, it is hyphenated: Even as an 18-year-old, Jim was incredibly mature for his age.

Subject–Verb Agreement

The verb are above is wrong; make it is (Straits Times Life! 26 May 2011). 

In English, the verb following a subject should agree with the subject; but if the subject is a complex noun phrase (in this case, TV drama Skins, which shows teens doing drugs and binge drinking), the verb almost always agrees with the head of that noun phrase.

The headline writer has presumably made the verb agree with the plural Skins, but the head of the noun phrase is in fact the singular drama.

Sink, Sank, Sunk

The highlighted verb is intended to be in the simple present tense, so it should be sank (Straits Times online, 12 August 2011). 

Sunk is, of course, the –en/ed participle of the verb sink, which has irregular past (sank) and –en/ed participle (sunk) forms, so we do not say His heart *sinked/*has sinked.

The –en/ed participle is more commonly known, especially in schools, as the past participle, but this is inaccurate since past tense is not inherent in the verb form, as the following examples illustrate:

(1)  The yacht has sunk.  (present perfective)
(2)  The yacht had sunk.  (past perfective)
(3)  The yacht will have sunk.  (modal perfective, referring to future time)

Note that, in all three cases, the verb sunk remains unchanged and any tense marking is left to the other, auxiliary verbs.

Noncount Nouns

This an advertisement on the Straits Times website.  The noun stuff is noncount in Standard English, but in Singapore English is often used as count (as the plural –s suffix suggests).

Other common noncount nouns used as count in Singapore English include markings (e.g. As an English teacher, I have lots of markings to do), junks, jargons, terminologies, and slangs.

Worse, Worst

The superlative worst above is wrong (Straits Times Life! supplement, 19 February 2011).  Instead, the comparative worse was needed here since the writer meant that there was no time ‘more bad’ than that referred to in the article.

Perhaps there is a phonological explanation for the above: worst ends in the consonant cluster /st/, and since the following word begins in /t/, the writer would probably have dropped the first /t/ in speech, and allowed this to influence his spelling. 

The deletion of /d/ and /t/ in rapid speech is in fact very common, even among BBC announcers; see, for example, David Deterding’s article.

Subject–Verb Agreement and Inversion

The verb comes above is wrong (Straits Times Life supplement, 22 January 2011). The writer probably assumed that the singular noun consumption was the subject of the sentence, but it is in fact the plural noun emissions.

This is because the sentence has an inverted order Adverbial + Verb + Subject, whereas a normal SVA structure would give us Carbon emissions come with low fuel consumption.

A/An

In Singapore schools we are often taught to use the indefinite article an before words beginning in vowels, and a elsewhere. However, many teachers seem unaware that this rule applies at a phonological level and not an orthographic one — in other words, it applies to sounds, not spelling.

This misunderstanding of the rule has probably led to the error in the caption above (Straits Times online, 14 February 2011): a NTU Linguistics student ought to be an NTU ..., because NTU begins in a vowel sound, /e/.

Young

For some mysterious reason, the Straits Times seems never to be able to handle the collective nouns the young and youth.  Both expressions refer to young people considered as a group, and are grammatically plural.  Hence, make it Young Prefer Newspapers.

Ellipsis

The verb give is wrong; it should have been giving (Straits Times, 27 November 2010). 

This is because the final clause shares an auxiliary verb with the preceding one, and since it is understood it may be omitted (or ellipted): he is not heeding her words and he (is) not giving in to his grief.

Spelling

An interesting spelling error in a BBC headline today (8 November 2010): Aborigenes should, of course, be Aborigines.  One wonders if the headline writer, it not merely careless, was thinking of Classical Greek names (e.g. Diogenes) when she or he typed this.

Past Perfect

In the article above, the writer recounts — in the past tense, naturally enough — her maiden experience at a casino.

The use of the simple past in the last sentence, however, is non-standard: since the realization that she had ‘had enough’ took place before her suggestion to H that they leave, she should have used the past perfect: I had had enough of the casino.

Scruffle

There is no such word in English as scruffle; make it scuffle. As a verb, scuffle means ‘to have a short fight that is not very violent’ (Longman).

Speakers sometimes inadvertently blend words when they cannot remember them accurately or are not careful. I had a university lecturer who said she once referred to somebody as portulent, when she had meant to say either corpulent or portly — but not both at the same time.

Subject–Verb Agreement

The verb were is wrong (Straits Times, 17 September 2010). 

Since the noun phrase the Singapore universities’ drop in rankings has a singular head noun drop, it needs to be followed by the singular verb was.

The Young

The headline above (Straits Times Online, 13 September 2010) contains a subject–verb agreement error; make it S’pore young worry MM.

The relevant sense of young here is ‘young people considered as a group’, hence it is equivalent to (one of the senses of) youth and is a collective noun.

How could we find out the grammatical properties of a noun, or indeed of any other grammatical category?  Here’s where a good learner’s dictionary comes in handy.  The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, for example, marks young as ‘[pl.]’, meaning that it is grammatically plural; accordingly, it should be followed by a plural verb.