Many people, both young and old, continue to say and write things such as:
Where is the pen and the pencil I bought for you?
Is Kojo and his friend ready for the exercise?
There lives a man and his family in that dilapidated house.
Why doesn't your friend and his pet come here again?
Needless to say, all the above sentences are incorrect because there is no agreement between the subjects of the sentences and their verbs.
As we know, in English, the subjects of sentences (the things, persons, ideas, places, etc. that the sentences talk about) must agree with their verbs (if the sentences are in the present tense) in number and in person.
So the following sentences are correct because their subjects agree with their verbs:
Your friend and his pet come here every day.
Where are the two girls who broke bounds yesterday?
My mum, as well as my dad, likes rice.
But the following sentences are incorrect because their subjects do not agree with their verbs:
All but Kofi lives at Adenta.
The flowers in the garden needs water.
How is your parents?
Now, many people are conscious of the need to make the subjects of the sentences they construct agree with their verbs, but when it comes to inverted sentences, they seem to forget about this need to ensure subject/verb agreement.
An inverted sentence is a sentence whose verb comes before the subject, as in most questions, unlike a normal sentence, whose subject comes before the verb.
Examples of inverted sentences are:
How are you and your family?
How is your mum?
There goes Mr Oti with his wife.
The principles on subject/verb agreement say whether a sentence is inverted or not, there must be agreement between the subject and the verb for that sentence to be correct.
In the first of the four incorrect sentences we wrote at the beginning of the lesson, for instance, the subject is the pen and the pencil, which is plural, for which reason it must agree with a plural verb, not a singular verb.
So the correct sentence is:
Where are the pen and the pencil I bought for you?
Do not be bothered by the fact that the correct sentence does not sound correct, while the incorrect one rather sounds correct — in English, correctness is not determined by how well a sentence or an expression sounds.
If we have to answer the question:
Where are the pen and the pencil I bought for you?
with a complete sentence, we will write or say:
The pen and the pencil you bought for me are missing/are here/are in my school bag, etc.
We are not likely to say or write:
The pen and the pencil you bought for me is missing/is here/is in my school bag, etc.
Can you correct the remaining three incorrect sentences in this same way?
