The couple is going to purchase the house? Or the couple are going to purchase the house? Even after all my years of editing, I can still get tripped up trying to make verbs agree with collective ...

Apostrophes are equal opportunity humiliators. As I wrote recently, apostrophes incriminate less-word-savvy types by popping up in plurals like “We play bridge with the Smith’s” and “He had two ...

Let us start with extracting from the underspecified lexical of the noun book the features of Count and Plural: First, let us suppose that the Nil feature Plural is specified as [+Pl], a rule occurrin ...

There is a myriad of ways we can express quantities in English, but there are just a couple words that are much in dispute. Wait. Should that be "there are myriad ways" and "just a couple of words"?

Some keen-eared Radio National listeners recently took issue with the following sentence, delivered on a book review program: "There's heartbreaking scenes in Murakami's new novel." It's not that the ...

One of the earliest and most useful grammar rules in English is that a verb should always agree with its subject in both person and number. Stated more simply, singular subjects should take verbs in ...