Timeline for "increase", singular or plural?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 30, 2014 at 0:43 | comment | added | Colin Fine | @ChristopherWoods: I don't see any mention of that vs which (was it in a comment which has since been deleted?) For me, in a restrictive relative clause, they are interchangeable, but which is a little more formal. | |
| Jan 29, 2014 at 21:14 | comment | added | Bort | Would changing it to "of which" be any better? | |
| Jan 28, 2014 at 19:39 | comment | added | Chris Woods | I agree that the OP should have used 'that' in place of which - however I have been proved wrong about the provenance of which/that in singular/plural usage, it seems that our modern rules concerning their usage haven't always been so. Anyway, I read the list of affecting factors to the process and inferred the plural irrespective of 'which'. | |
| Jan 28, 2014 at 19:25 | comment | added | Colin Fine | @KristinaLopez: true, I missed that possible reading. It's a genuinely ambiguous sentence (though I now agree that your reading is more likely). For me, the answer would still be singular, because in my English data is a mass noun, but if the writer (or editor!) prefers data are, then using a plural verb will actually disambiguate. Nevertheless, strong advice to the writer is Rewrite the sentence to remove the ambiguity that Kristina and I have found. | |
| Jan 28, 2014 at 19:20 | comment | added | Kristina Lopez | Sorry, Colin, I don't agree. I'm reading the sentence to say (to paraphrase) "...that the intensity data and file conversion (combined), increase the total execution time." | |
| Jan 28, 2014 at 19:15 | history | answered | Colin Fine | CC BY-SA 3.0 |