grammaticality - Is "a wide range of features" singular or plural?


In the office, we've been having a discussion about the grammar in a sentence and have differing opinions about what is right and what is wrong... It is a very minor issue but is still bugging me :)


The sentence in question is:



A wide range of features is available.



Which sounds more natural to me if it is written as:



A wide range of features are available.



The justification for it is that the "is" is referring to the "wide range of features" as a whole rather than just the "features".


I was just about getting used to it when I decided to substitute a different word instead of "features". I just can't get my head around something like:



A wide range of sausages is available.



Further to this, if I substitute "a wide range of" with "various" then it has to be are.


Which one is right?


Edit: Thanks for all of the responses. I didn't expect to open up such a can of worms but now I understand the technicalities. I still prefer are in this case though :)



Answer



“A wide range of features is available” is more ‘technically correct’ according to traditional prescriptive grammar, and arguably more logical.


Both forms are completely idiomatically acceptable, though; Google n-grams suggests that as of the 90’s, they were roughly equally common:


enter image description here


That shows just this specific example, which appears only in recent decades, but there are a host of other similar constructions, going back for centuries, and in many levels of writing, not just casual speech. So well-informed modern grammars agree, both forms are completely correct; go with whatever you feel flows best!


Edit: Actually, in contexts like yours, are is probably rather more common than that graph might suggest. Looking more closely, of the results for “range of features is”, quite a lot are in contexts like “The range of features is typically quite large…”, where “are” wouldn’t make sense — the predicate unambiguously applies to the range, not to the individual features. I can’t think of a corpus search that would weed out such cases; on a very rough perusal of Google Books results, I’d guesstimate that in contexts like yours where either is idiomatic (eg “…a remarkable range of features is/are visible…”), the are form is maybe about twice as common as the is. (Thanks to @FumbleFingers for pointing this out in comments.)


Edit: as comments on other answers show, the two versions aren’t always interchangeable; one can certainly come up with examples where only one or the other is idiomatic. But in this specific example, both are quite fine, as the n-grams search above and more in-depth searching along similar lines illustrate.


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