Collectives

The use of a plural verb here (Daily Telegraph, 14 March 2013) may look like a mistake to readers unfamiliar with British English (BrE).

In BrE, collective nouns such as team, family and committee are often treated as plural when the emphasis is on their members acting as individuals rather than on the collective as a single unit, hence:

This year’s team are especially strong.
The family next door are always shouting at each other.
The new commitee are the friendliest I’ve ever worked with.

The use of the plural is sentences such as My bank are very reliable, and in the example above from the Daily Telegraph, would not be unusual in BrE, but this would probably be more colloquial and informal.

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.

Topic–comment

The above (Sunday Times, 12 May 2013) is an interesting example of a topic–comment (or left-dislocation) structure in Singapore English (SgE).

Where Standard English has the sentence structure subject–predicate, SgE often has topic–comment, where the topic of the sentence is stated, and then a comment is added to it. 

In the sentence above, the topic of the sentence is Linna Tay, mother of national swimmer Jerryl Yong begins the sentence; for may be thought of as a topic marker which separates the topic from the comment. In the comment clause, the topic ‘reappears’ as the subject; this is called a resumptive pronoun.

(A subject–predicate counterpart of the above would be Linna Tay, mother of national swimmer Jerryl Yong, has to ....)

While topic–comment is more typical of Singapore Colloquial English (SCE, or Singlish), it is also fairly common in more formal uses (such as formal newspaper reports and student essays), which led me to argue in my PhD thesis (Cambridge, 2007) that there is good reason to believe that all of SgE is, in fact, underlyingly topic–comment rather than subject–predicate.

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.

Inversion

The singular verb comes is wrong (Daily Telegraph, 5 October 2012) because it has erroneously been made to agree with the singular noun immediately preceding it, i.e. focus.

Rather, the verb should agree with drawbacks, the real subject in this sentence, which is an example of subject–adverbial version. Sans inversion the constituent order would have been
But drawbacks come with this narrow focus.

Subject–Verb Agreement

This example of a subject–verb agreement error is from the online version of The Straits Times (11 April 2013).

The third-person singular present tense –s marker on the highlighted verb is wrong because NUS and NTU form a plural subject.

They cannot collectively be thought of as a single entity; otherwise they would not be occupying two different positions in the ranking.

A good test of this would be to replace NUS and NTU with an appropriate pronoun and see which works best – it should be obvious that the plural they rather than the singular it is needed here.

The Arts Inspire

This is from a series of outdoor advertisements that appeared throughout Singapore last year as part of the Arts Festival.

The arts inspires me is wrong because arts here is a count noun, and plural. The correct verb would have been inspire.

Less/Fewer

This example is from the Daily Telegraph (15 April 2013). Fewer is wrong here; less is normally used for statistical measures (e.g. less than 30% per cent, not fewer than ...). Fewer would have been correct if a raw figure had been used, e.g. Fewer than 200 readers scored full marks.

The error was particularly ironic because it appeared in an article about good grammar.

Headlines

This headline (Straits Times, 27 August 2012) caused much hilarity when it appeared, and rightly so. The intended meaning was, of course, that 40% of each cohort would get a chance to enter a local university, but apparently more people misintrepreted it to mean the 40% would be shot.

The intended meaning has shot as a noun, with an omitted indefinite article, a, while the unintended meaning is an example of a get-passive, where shot is a verb.

There is actually nothing wrong grammatically with the headline — function words are very often omitted in headlines because the reader can mentally fill them in. In this case, however, it was unfortunate because the omission of the article a led readers to interpret get shot as a passive verb group.

Will

In Standard English, habitual events are usually expressed using verbs in the simple present tense, e.g. I go for a jog every morning before heading to work.

In Singapore English, however, this is very often expressed using the modal verb will, as in the example above: During his daily commute to work, Mr Henry Kwok will whip out his Samsung Galaxy Note ... (Straits Times Digital Life supplement, 9 January 2013). This is no doubt an influence from Chinese, which uses 会 (huì) to express habitual events.

Collective Nouns

When this headline appeared (Straits Times, 2 August 2012), quite a few people apparently wrote to the folks at the Speak Good English Movement to ask if the singular verb win was a mistake.

It is not: in British English, collective nouns are often treated as plural, particularly sports teams — hence, Manchester United are the champions, and Singapore win individual Olympic medal.

While British English makes a distinction between collective nouns functioning as a single unit (= singular verb) or as individuals who happen to belong in the same group (= plural), American English and Singapore English almost always treat collective nouns as singular.

The exception in Singapore English, however, is sports reporting, which consistently follows British practice, as the headline shows.

The Elderly

This appeared in the online version of the Straits Times (ST Interactive, 17 January 2012). 

Elderly in this context is a noun, and like all other nouns derived from adjectives or adjective phrases and used to refer collectively to a group, it is considered plural.  Hence, prescriptively, singular enjoys is wrong and plural enjoy is preferred.  Similar nouns include (the) dispossessed, less fortunate, sick, meek and brave.

Subject–Verb Agreement

The highlighted verb (Straits Times Life!, 9 September 2011) would probably have English teachers reaching for their red pens. The correct form is the singular has, rather than plural have, because the verb should agree with the head noun, collection, and not the nearest noun, watercolours.

Incidentally, in British English the name Farquhar is pronounced /ˈfɑːkə/ or /ˈfɑːkwə/. However, most Singaporeans who have attended English-medium schools will remember having been taught the pronunciation /ˈfɑːkwɑː/. Considering that Singaporeans generally make no distinction between /ʌ/ and /ɑː/, insisting on using the British pronunciation for this British name would probably be ill advised.

Kena

When teaching grammar, and in particular passive verb groups, I’ve often found it useful to use the Singlish passive marker, kena — this is because many students have great difficulty telling whether a clause is in the active or passive voice.

In English, the passive voice is usually formed with the appropriate form of be or get:

(1)  Shirley was/got promoted last week.
(2)  Shirley was/got cheated last week.

Using the passive marker kena is a useful test for the passive voice: if it can be used in place of be/get, then the clause is probably passive.  However, the ‘kena’ test has an important limitation: it can be used only with outcomes considered to be negative or undesired:

(3)  * Shirley kena promoted last week.  (positive outcome, ungrammatical in Singlish)
(4)  Shirley kena cheated last week. (negative outcome, grammatical in Singlish)

Leaving aside the issue of preferred verb forms in Singlish (kena cheat is more likely), we note that (4) is good because it describes an event considered negative or undesired (i.e. nobody likes to be cheated), but (3) is definitely out because most people would wish to be promoted.  For this reason, kena is said to a marker of the adversative passive.

How Come You Never Call Me?

To many people in Singapore, Peppermint Patty must sound very Singaporean in the first panel.

For starters, how come? is widely believed to be a Singlish expression, but it is not, and is in fact very common in colloquial American English (Peanuts is, of course, American).

Furthermore, Peppermint Patty’s utterance differs from Singlish in two important respects.  First, as is obvious from the subsequent panels, she really means ‘Why do you never call me?’ whereas in Singlish never is often used as a simple negator, so the most obvious meaning to most Singaporeans would be ‘Why didn’t you call me?’ 

Second, Peppermint Patty would probably never drop you, whereas for most Singaporeans it is redundant and stylistically heavy since Singlish is a pro-drop (null subject) language and subject and object pronouns need not be expressed if their referents (here, Chuck and the speaker, Peppermint Patty) are understood or recoverable from context.  In other words, the most natural formulation of the sentence in Singlish would be Why never call?  (Call in Standard English may also be intransitive, in which case Why don’t you ever call? does not have a missing object pronoun, me.)

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.