Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 December 1

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December 1

Is the word total singular or plural or both?

Is the word total singular or plural or both? Sentence A: "The total is much higher than I expected." The subject is total and the verb is singular (is). The sentence sounds fine to me. Sentence B: "A total of 17 prisoners were killed when violence broke out." The subject is total and the verb is plural (were). The sentence sounds fine to me. So, is the word total singular or plural or either/both (depending on context)? Thanks. 2602:252:D13:6D70:9562:88E6:981C:9C76 (talk) 08:28, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

I am re-examining Sentence B, which states "A total of 17 prisoners were killed when violence broke out." If we remove the prepositional phrase ("of 17 prisoners"), we are left with: "A total of 17 prisoners were killed when violence broke out." Or, in other words: "A total were killed when violence broke out." Something seems "off" there? No? 2602:252:D13:6D70:9562:88E6:981C:9C76 (talk) 08:32, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

"Total" is singular. Some words and phrases in English that are grammatically singular may be construed as plural when they refer to a group of things or people, because they are seen as referring to the things or people individually, not as a unit. Perhaps the most common example is "a number of people", which is plural because it's about the people. "A total of 17 prisoners" is another example of the same thing. --70.49.170.168 (talk) 08:55, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

I once read somewhere in my travels through the world of venery that an appropriate collective term for a group of statisticians would be "a number of statisticians". That would be a singular use.

It's clear that the answer to the OP's question "Is the word total singular or plural or both?" is: It depends on the context. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 09:05, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

What is "off" is the grammatical analysis of Sentence B. "A total" is not the subject, modified by "of 17 prisoners". The subject is "17 prisoners", modified by "a total of". This can be shown by removing the modifying phrase. "A total was killed when violence breaks out" does not retain the essential meaning of the sentence. "17 prisoners were killed when violence broke out" does. --Nicknack009 (talk) 11:48, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Looking for the essential meaning is something we were doing naturally and easily back then before the era of computers, before we started to "think" like computers... Akseli9 (talk) 12:35, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

When I was learning grammar, we used to do a lot of sentence diagramming. And this sentence would have used total as the subject, which would then have required a singular, not plural, verb. But I think that Nicknack009's version of it is really how we construe such a sentence.

I guess the problem is that the preposition "of" demands an object, and the only possible object is [seventeen] prisoners. StevenJ81 (talk) 13:53, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

The word of is usually a preposition, but it can also serve as a particle linking a quantifying modifier to a noun in a phrase. Other examples are a lot of, not even one of, a variety of, and so on, where of is a particle linking a quantifier with a plural noun or pronoun. Even though the pronoun after of is in the objective case, the entire phrase serves as the subject of the sentence, with the apparent object of of determining the number of the verb. Marco polo (talk) 15:18, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

The distinction being drawn here is between notional agreement and grammatical agreement; in deciding whether a verb should be conjugated to agree with the plurality of the word itself or with the plurality of the thing the word represents. This is not as settled matter grammatically, and there are lots of dialectical differences, as well as many idiomatic differences that defy direct logic or any systematic analysis. The deal is, sometimes English verbs will match the grammatical number of the word (as in "total ... is ...") and sometimes English verbs will agree with the sense of the concept (as in "total ... are ..."). There is no "one size fits all" system you can follow to fit every situation. --Jayron32 15:24, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for that link to notional agreement, which redirects to synesis. Until now, being "construed as plural" was the only expression I knew for this concept, with the noun for "construe" being "construction"; I would have said that Wikipedia has no article on it. Certainly neither construal nor grammatical construction is about this. I think some hatnotes or redirects are needed, but I'm not sure offhand what they should be. --70.49.170.168 (talk) 17:12, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

As the anonymous user has pointed out, it's a general problem. They gave the example "a number of people". Here are some additional examples: "most of the people", "the majority of them", "a minority of them", and the like. HOOTmag (talk) 15:56, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

When one sees this kind of situation, though, there is not always agreement on how to handle it—and that's entirely aside from the fact that UK and US English don't always handle in the same way. So, I would agree that "a number of them are" and even "most of the people are", but I would write "the majority/minority of them is". The majority/minority in question is a specific, defined group. But what do I know? StevenJ81 (talk) 17:20, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

This brought to mind the Hoagy Carmichael song, "What Kind of Man Is You?", written about 80 years ago. Akld guy (talk) 18:44, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Follow up

Let's look at this sentence again: A total of 17 prisoners were killed when violence broke out. What is the subject of that sentence? Is it "a total", with "of 17 prisoners" as a prepositional phrase? Or is the subject "17 prisoners", modified by "a total of"? Thanks. 2602:252:D13:6D70:F5ED:8E01:7F6E:E9DE (talk)

There is only one total, so it is singular. For multiple totals, try this example: "Cashiers, bring me your totals by the end of the day, please". StuRat (talk) 17:51, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

That's a different usage and irrelevant.

In the terminology I learned in school, the subject is "A total of 17 prisoners" and the bare subject is "total". (Your terminology may vary.) The point is that in English the verb does not necessarily agree in grammatical number with the subject, as discussed in the original section. --70.49.170.168 (talk) 18:52, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

One could argue that the "a total of" part is unneeded. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 06:10, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Of course it's unneeded. Those words are typically used in that manner as a quick workaround to obey the stylistic rule that a sentence should not start with a digit (because you can't capitalize digits—well, I've seen something like it done in Reader's Digest, in the Canadian edition, but in conventional typography you can't). But the presence of those words does change the grammatical structure, which is what we were asked about. --76.69.45.64 (talk) 21:45, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

"There were 17 prisoners." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:25, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

I don't think that says exactly the same thing. Oh, by the way, I'm the same person who was posting from 70.49.170.168 above. --76.69.45.64 (talk) 04:46, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, all. 2602:252:D13:6D70:BD83:3784:351:F8B4 (talk) 02:07, 6 December 2015 (UTC)