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  1. There is a cat, a dog, and an elephant in the room.
  2. There are two cats, a dog, and an elephant in the room.
  3. There is a cat, two dogs, and an elephant in the room.

In the first sentence, all of these animals are acting as a single unit, thus the subject is singular. But I'm not sure about the 2 and 3. Why plural subject for 2 and the opposite for 3?

ColleenV
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Utshaw
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2 Answers2

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There is a cat, a dog, and an elephant in the room.

There are two cats, a dog, and an elephant in the room.

There is a cat, two dogs, and an elephant in the room.

In all these examples, the subject is "there", not the various animals.

The verb-form is usually determined by the concept of proximity: the verb agrees with the nearest coordinate.

It's not actually a rule as such, but a useful guide in some cases.

On that understanding, they are all OK.

BillJ
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  • My gut feel was we'd normally itemize the single item first, if the other was plural, but checking out all 4 permutations of 1 or 2 cats and 1 or 2 dogs it seems we consistently tend to specify the plural item first with those. Perhaps I was misled by thinking of things like a mother and [her] two children, a table and chairs, a coach and horses, fish and chips... – FumbleFingers Feb 08 '24 at 11:26
  • "There" is the subject? Is it not simply an inversion of "a cat is there"? – Andy Bonner Feb 08 '24 at 18:22
  • @AndyBonner "There" must be the subject for several reasons: (1) it occupies the basic subject position before the verb phrase. (2) In subject-aux inversions it occurs after the auxiliary, as in "Was there a cat ...". [3] It occurs as subject in interrogative tags, cf. "There was a cat etc, wasn't there?". – BillJ Feb 09 '24 at 10:54
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All sentences are correct

  1. There is a cat, a dog, and an elephant in the room.
  2. There are two cats, a dog, and an elephant in the room.
  3. There is a cat, two dogs, and an elephant in the room.

However It is uncommon to have an elephant in a room, so these sentences might feel unusual or unrealistic in terms of content.

The reason why number 3 is written with "is" instead of "are" is because In English, when using "there is" or "there are" constructions, we typically match the verb tense with the noun that follows, rather than the nouns that come after it. Therefore, because "cat" is the first noun in the series, we use the singular verb "is." The subsequent nouns "two dogs" and "an elephant" do not affect the verb tense. So, the correct form of the sentence is: "There is a cat, two dogs, and an elephant in the room."

Kaveh Behnia
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