grammaticality - Should I say "there is a handful of..." or "there are a handful of...."?



I want to write that I have handful of somethings. Which of these is the correct form?



  1. There is a handful of somethings.

  2. There are a handful of somethings.


Are both correct?



Answer



Rimmer correctly identifies phrases like a handful of . . . and a pack of . . . as premodifying elements in a noun phrase, rather than as the subject of the clause and, for the same reason, Mustafa is right in saying that a number of . . . is followed by a plural verb. However, there is a tendency, particularly in speech, for There’s . . . rather than There are . . . to be used regardless of the number of the noun that follows, as in, for example, There’s a few people who believe my story. In the words of the ‘Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English’ (the stripped-down version of the magisterial Longman Grammar),



‘in conversation . . . the verb is likely to be singular even when the following notional subject is plural’.



And as ‘The Cambridge Guide to English Usage’ says,



[There’s] seems to be evolving into a fixed phrase, rather like the French C’est . . . , serving the needs of the ongoing discourse rather than the grammar of the sentence.



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