ESL General English Grammar Questions

Re: 'There seems...' 'There seem...'?

Peaceblinkfriend — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:13:09 GMT

Oh, so this is how it works! I get it now. Thanks for your replies.

PBF

Re: 'There seems...' 'There seem...'?

CalifJim — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:41:58 GMT

there constructions show agreement between the verb and the noun which follow there.

There [is / was / seems to be / appears to be / has to be / should be / could be / must be] a restaurant on this street.

There [are / were / seem to be / appear to be / have to be / should be / could be / must be] hundreds of restaurants on this street.

Re: 'There seems...' 'There seem...'?

Kooyeen — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:34:03 GMT

There seems is singular, there seem is plural.

There seems to be a suspicious guy.
There seem to be several suspicious guys.

Re: 'There seems...' 'There seem...'?

Peaceblinkfriend — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:08:34 GMT

Thanks Mister Micawber.

I didn't know much about 'there' and it's nature so I wasn't sure what to make of the results. Just for your information, here are the links to the search results. 'there seems' 'there seem'

So when do we use 'seem' or 'seems'?

Thank you again

PBF

Re: 'There seems...' 'There seem...'?

Mister Micawber — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:55:07 GMT

.
I am surprised at your results. There is existential, so both forms should be common:

There seem to be many people missing today.
There seems to be someone missing.

'There seems...' 'There seem...'?

Peaceblinkfriend — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:47:59 GMT

Is it always 'There seems...' ? Or we can say 'There seem...' as well.

e.g I made one speech on the subject and I've not referred to it since, and there seems no purpose in doing so.

I referred to the corpus and it returned hits for both 'there seems' and 'there seem'. However, 'there seems' appeared six times more frequently than 'there seem' in the corpus.
This led me to think that 'there seem' is non-standard. The thing that I am not sure of is whether 'there seem' is grammatical.

Thank you

PBF