Timeline for Number agreement of a noun with several adjectives
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
12 events
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| Sep 29, 2011 at 15:53 | comment | added | Peter Shor | Consider a story which includes a pair of men, one fat and one thin. I think you could say: "The fat and thin man were coming towards me ..." You can't really use "men" here, since that would describe more than two people. On the other hand, if you said "The thin and tall man were coming towards me ..." it doesn't sound right, because one man could be both thin and tall. You need to say "The thin and the tall man ..." (I'd add an extra "the" in "The fat and thin man", as well, but I don't believe you really need to since, like ordinals, they're mutually exclusive adjectives.) | |
| Sep 29, 2011 at 1:12 | comment | added | o4tlulz | So I guess all three options in the answer are equally correct? @FumbleFingers. "The first and second get" is OK, but what would you use after the second as a noun? runner or runners? boat or boats? Singular or plural?4 | |
| Sep 28, 2011 at 17:29 | comment | added | aedia λ | For me, roughly increasing felicity: * The first, second, fifth, and eighth sandwiches is moldy, ? The first, second, fifth, and eighth sandwiches, each are moldy, ? The first, second, fifth, and eighth sandwich are moldy, ? The first, second, fifth, and eighth sandwich is moldy, completely felicitous: The first, second, fifth, and eighth sandwich, each is moldy, The first, second, fifth, and eighth sandwiches are moldy (this is meant to correspond to the runners wearing blue, but I couldn't wrap my head around repeated grammaticality assessments of sandwiches dressed in blue) | |
| Sep 28, 2011 at 17:03 | comment | added | Daniel | But if that's the only difference, then why is sandwiches ungrammatical while runners isn't? | |
| Sep 28, 2011 at 17:02 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | The "sandwich" version works because of the repeated "a", similar to repeating "runner". There must be some "borderline" phrasing in this general area, where some people pluralise and others don't, but offhand I can't come up with an example. | |
| Sep 28, 2011 at 16:58 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Peter Shor: I thought googling "first and second gets" would get quite a few hits from the Net at large - and so it appeared, when initially Google said About 86,100 results. But after I scrolled through a couple of pages it admitted there were only actually 31 results after all (probably the most extreme "bad guess" I've yet seen from Google). Cutting to the chase, this seems to be one construction where people rarely make a mistake, even in casual text typed over the Net. | |
| Sep 28, 2011 at 16:44 | comment | added | Daniel | I edited, since you are correct. I'll have to think about the sandwich one, though; maybe I'll figure out why that sounds right. | |
| Sep 28, 2011 at 16:43 | history | edited | Daniel | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Sep 28, 2011 at 15:00 | comment | added | Peter Shor | Let me add that saying "runners" is correct. But you could also correctly say "The first, the second, the fifth, and the eighth runner are all wearing blue." I don't know whether you can say it if you drop the "the"s as well, though. | |
| Sep 28, 2011 at 14:54 | comment | added | Peter Shor | I'm not convinced. Suppose I were ordering sandwiches, and I wanted one tuna sandwich and one turkey sandwich. I would say "Could I please have a tuna and a turkey sandwich?" (not sandwiches; that would be wrong, even though there are two of them) Eliminating repeated words in parallel structure is allowed in English. So why isn't it grammatical to take your second sentence, and eliminate the redundant "runner"s, to get "The first, second, fifth, and eighth runner are all wearing blue."? | |
| Sep 28, 2011 at 13:02 | history | edited | Daniel | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Sep 28, 2011 at 12:56 | history | answered | Daniel | CC BY-SA 3.0 |