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Pastimes : SI Grammar and Spelling Lab -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (1115)	4/11/1998 5:59:00 PM
From: Sowbug	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4710

What? "He -- and ONLY he -- is in the room." Why "are"? Well, this is my reasoning: 1. Start with a skeleton sentence: Noun and noun is/are in the noun. 2. Clearly, with that skeleton sentence, you'd have to pick "are" as the correct verb form. 3. Adding an adjective (such as "only") shouldn't change the verb (exception: one fish, two fish). 4. Therefore, using this reasoning, I'd conclude that it should be "He and only he are in the room." Obviously, that's flawed reasoning, because that sentence is wrong. So it seems that you can't just apply grammar rules without a knowledge of what you're talking about, because to get to the right answer ("He and only he is . . .") you have to realize that the two "he"s are the same, and that adding the second "he" doesn't change the number of the subject.