In the previous sentence, the author may assume that men and the verb that follows it must agree, but the verb is not related to the earlier immediate noun, but to the substantive, wise subject, so because the way is singular, so it must be. To explain another way, the phrase “in which you spoke to these people” is not relevant to the subject-verb arrangement of the sentence; The basic message, “Your way of doing things is disrespectful,” should be: “Your manner is disrespectful.” The authors of the ESL are also naturally disoriented when a prepositional expression between a name and a verb, as demonstrated here: in English, a subject (which or what of a sentence) must correspond to the singular verb of the third person in a simple contemporary form. How many times have you heard your students say something like this: “People in my class think our teacher is cool” or “John and Maria are at the mall right now”? Yes, my friends, these are the phrases where the name and the verb don`t work well together. 2. There may be more than one pair of noun verb in a sentence; You have to make sure that each pair in number agrees. However, if the second element of the subject is plural, the verb should also be plural (“Neither John nor his sisters were in school today”), whereas if the first element is plural, but the second is singular, the verb is singular (“Neither John nor John`s sisters were in school today”). This last construction is certainly correct, but heavy; A simple solution is to reverse the order of the elements and use a plural verb. The verb-subject chord is one of those things: If you don`t use it correctly, it may seem that you don`t know English. The theme is “John and Mary,” but because it is not a matter of distinguishing John and Mary as individuals (contrary to what unites them as a duo), the verb is made assuming that the reference to John is as an individual and to Mary as an individual, so the correct form is “Neither John nor Mary was in school today.” (In other words, “John was not in school today, and Mary was not at school today.”) 4. Some nouns and pronouns seem plural, but function as “uniquely clever” nouns, so there must be a correct match with “trick singular” names and pronouns. An example is “everyone,” a unique name that refers to a group, but must correspond to a singular verb, that is, “everyone is happy.” So I created a short video (about 10 minutes or something like that) in which I can show my ESL students how I teach technical verb tuning. It begins with a brief overview of the two parts of the discourse – a name and a verb – and there are five important rules for agreeing thematic verbs. Writers, for whom English is not their first language, find a subject-verb agreement (and any noun-verb agreement) a challenge in learning the language.
In addition to the difficulties in reconciling an agreement depending on whether individual or plural nouns and pronouns are used, and the additional complexities of the person (first person, second person and third person) and tense (past, present, etc.), the five topics discussed below can lead to confusion and error. A plural addition is a word like scissors, the plural in construction, but singularly in the sense, which follows here a false form of verb: 1. Identify parts of the language 2. Simple – Progressive Tenses 3. Word-subject contract 4. Nomène – Article 5. Parallel structure 6. Present perfect verbs 7. Future Tense 8. Tense Review/Preview 9. Pronomen 10.