grammar - "is" vs "are" when followed by a number


I read the following sentence on YouTube and initially thought it was grammatically incorrect:



Here are 10 minutes of the movie Black Hawk Down!



I thought "are" should have been "is" but then I realized minutes is plural so the plural form, are, is used correctly. I also thought how most people would naturally say "Here is ten dollars in change" but is the use of the singular form, is, correct since dollars is plural?


Am I misunderstanding a rule?



Answer



In most cases, if the subject and verb do not agree then we have a grammatical error, as in the following examples:



My friend have a dog.


I never eats cheese.



However, there are cases where semantics overrides the usual agreement rules. This often occurs with collective nouns:



The committee have decided to disband.


The team are not playing very well.



In such cases the speaker conceptualises the committee or team in terms of their members.


The opposite occurs in examples such as:



Three weeks seems a long time.


Here's ten dollars.


Two eggs is plenty.



According to the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (p504):



... here an NP (noun phrase) that is formally plural is conceptualised as referring to a single measure (of time, money, distance, or whatever) and accordingly takes a singular verb. The measure override is characteristically found with be or other complex-intransitive verbs such as seem.



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