There is / are a ...

Yoong Liat wrote:

There is a dog and two cats in his house. There are a dog and two cats in his house. Which is the correct sentence or are both okay?

Hi Yoong Liat

(should I say 'Hi Yoong' or 'Hi Liat'?)

Let's start with a couple of links to my favourite sources:

http://www.bartleby.com/64/C001/060.html/#COMPOUNDSUBJ

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/sv_agr.htm

According to the first text, there are two rules that seem to clash in your example.  One rule says that compound subjects connected by and should take a plural verb.  The other rule says that often a verb will take the number of the closest noun.

I think that in your example the first rule will take precedence over the second, and therefore the verb has to be in plural. I would not accept the singular form in a student's essay.

Having said that, maybe style considerations can come to our rescue.  Why not rephrase the sentence? The meaning remains the same and all rules are now satisfied: There are two cats and a dog in his house.

Regards, Patrick

Yoong Liat,

I found this part which might be of interest.

Under notional agreement - "Similarly, there are some nouns like mumps and news that are plural in form but take a singular verb: The mumps was once a common childhood disease. Amounts often take a singular verb: Ten thousand bucks is a lot of money. Here again we have notional, but not grammatical, agreement—the ten thousand bucks is considered a single quantity, and it gets a singular verb."

Instead of "is", they have "was".  I think it's the same considering your initial post.

"There are a dog and two cats in his house."

Saying "are" then "a" just sounds wrong.  I would not expect to see this when reading an article or watching the news.  However, a writer of a story might want to give an image of a dog and two cats together as a group.  When we look at it this way, an argument can be made to use plural.

For example, when we refer to sports teams we use "are" instead of "is":

Q: Who IS winning?

A1: The New York Yankees ARE winning. / NOT The New York Yankees IS winning.

(Even without the "s" to make it plural):
A2: The Boston Red Sox ARE winning. / NOT The Boston Red Sox IS winning.

If you are going to use "are" then give a pause like a comma before saying "a".  

SHORTENING THE LANGUAGE

Another point I would like to make is that native speakers shorten their language.  I think I would hear "There's a dog...." more often than "There is a dog". "There's" is a common default, even if we switched the order.  "There's two cats and a dog in his house."

Any overall problem comes from the sentence not an individual word.  I get so lost in Japanese because I become fixated on one word in the sentence instead of reading the sentence as an unbreakable whole like with a word itself and not worrying about the letters that make up that word.