Timeline for Should the noun after "any" be singular or plural?
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| Jun 16, 2013 at 17:31 | comment | added | Shoe | @FumbleFingers. Agreed. Context is king! Do you have any book? is at least of dubious grammaticality when asked in order to determine if someone possesses books. But it is perfectly ok when followed by your qualifying clause and asked in the expectation that there might be at most one such. | |
| Jun 16, 2013 at 17:04 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @ Shoe: As usual, context is everything! I doubt many people would seriously object to, for example, "Do you have any book that might shed some light on this question?". The speaker probably expects there will be no such books, and at best he's only expecting there might be one, so asking for plural books could seem a bit "presumptuous". | |
| Jun 16, 2013 at 16:47 | comment | added | Shoe | A question mark at the beginning of sentence is the convention used in The Cambridge Grammar Of The Language to indicate constructions 'of questionable grammaticality'. I'm not sure about Do you have any book? It doesn't fall into the same category as what the CGEL denotes *ungrammatical. Their example is, coincidently, *This books is mine. | |
| Jun 16, 2013 at 16:04 | comment | added | TrevorD | Thanks. When you mention use of the "?" as "a convention", do you mean a convention on SE or what? It's (obviously) not a convention I've ever come across. As regards the actual answer, to me, Do you have any child/book? seems plainly wrong - not merely questionable. I would say Do you have a child/book? if I were using the singular. | |
| Jun 16, 2013 at 15:58 | comment | added | Shoe | @TrevorD. Thanks. Edited to include the more common examples. The question mark at the beginning of a sentence is a convention to show that the sentence is questionable! An asterisk in the same place denotes an error. | |
| Jun 16, 2013 at 15:57 | history | edited | Shoe | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jun 16, 2013 at 15:53 | comment | added | TrevorD | In the penultimate section, you state "the plural is more common" (with which I agree), but then illustrate it by using the singular in your examples, which I find confusing. And what is the "?" at the front of the line meant to indicate? | |
| Jun 16, 2013 at 15:12 | history | answered | Shoe | CC BY-SA 3.0 |