grammar - "What they are is x" — is singular "is" correct, and why?


Is the following sentence correct?



Such splendid isolation is the privilege of the giants of a discipline, and giants in the world of scholarship is definitely what the authors of this volume are.



I found it disconcerting, but I do not feel confident evaluating its correctness. The question is particularly interesting because it appears in the description of a book related to linguistics! http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-North-American-English-Phonetics/dp/3110167468/



There seem to be a number of issues here. The clause "what the authors of this volume are" rather than a simpler noun phrase, the atypical arrangement of the sentence for emphasis (as in "The winner is you." instead of "You are the winner."), etc.


The above issues make it far trickier than "The authors of this volume are definitely giants in their discipline."


PS - In addition to the question itself, please feel free to correct/edit any of the terms I describe clumsily (the title, the parenthetical statement in the first paragraph, etc).



Answer



Let's strip the non-essential elements from your construction (and add a bit of context to make it seem natural):



Dwarves? What they are is giants, not dwarves


Clever? What I am is mad, not clever.



(Notice that I have removed the inversion from your sentence, because it obscures the construction even more, while being non-essential.) This sounds correct to me, just as your example —except that the part before "is what" is pushed back a bit too far to my taste in your example, delaying the suspension a bit too long, which makes it a slightly awkward, but acceptable.


What seems to happen here is that a what subordinate clause acts as a singular subject of the third person, even if it refers to several objects semantically, and even if the subject complement (giants) is plural or of the first person. This is probably because our subconscious treats it as an abstract unit, which is by default a third person singular.


The same singular third person seems to be applied to which when it refers not to a specific word, but to a sentence or thought:



Achilles dragged Hector's body around the battlefield attached to his chariot. The Trojans were perplexed and enraged, which is just what Achilles wanted, or so it seemed.



You can see the third person singular being used to refer to the entire main clause (or to the thought expressed in it).


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