2.10 Subject-verb agreement

Rule: Subject and verb must agree in number and person.

Examples of errors:

1. But it take a couple of years until the child learns to use speech correctly.
2. That's only the opinion of a boy who know him.
3. The President need to be tough.
4. Isolated old people must think that nobody want them.,
5. She don't want a child from such a man who is perhaps ill in his head.
6. That the market is not sated and that not all hope is lost show the Japanese example.
7. If the mother already have a lot of children, abortion should be allowed.
8. If she have the desire to abort the child the doctor should agree.
9. I thought that I were pretty well trained for university.
10. The police is always looking for Turks.
11. Pupils who cannot keep up with the class has to repeat a year.
12. Cinemas, theaters and concert halls is available to everyone.
13. Just after the summertime the shops starts their Christmas business.
14. The great majority of people is poor.

Sentences (10)-(14) have plural subjects and require plural verbs. Police. in (10), like cattle, is always plural and non-count, the count form being policeman (-men). Collective nouns are more problematic, since they can be used in the same form with either singular or plural verbs. depending on whether the noun is thought of as a single whole or as a collection of individuals, although in American English there is a strong tendency to use only singular verbs with such nouns. Majority in (14) is more likely to be plural if the head noun of a following of phrase is plural (e.g. people), because, lying closer to the verb, it is easily misconstrued as the grammatical subject.

(l)-(8) have third person singular subjects and require the third singular verb form. The tendency of learners to regularize the anomalous third person singular in English is not surprising, particularly since many native speakers do exactly the same thing. It is a regular feature of the colloquial speech of black Americans, for example, and occurs very frequently in British and American popular music, to which, of course, Germans have a great deal of exposure. Nevertheless, dropping the third singular suffix is definitely considered substandard.

Be is the only verb in English with more than one form in the simple past tense: I/he/she/it was, we/they were. The regularized form in this case is was, so that one might hear we/you/they was, but this, again, is conspicuously substandard.