Let's say :"Alexander, stake on this season"

Okay, let me first confirm there is no such thing called "delayed subject-verb agreement" in English grammar. I feel somewhat guilty that I had to use a little poetic license to make a point.

I was correct though to contend there is no consensus on a correct usage when it comes to the subject-verb agreement in "one of those who" adjective clauses. This is true even among panels of linguists.

I believe that notional agreement, rather than agreement by proximity, is the more sensible approach to determine whether singular or plural verb should be used in these situations. HI Mana already explained nicely this concept of "notional agreement" in his post, I'd like to expound the topic in a bit more detail.

It turns out an antecedent may not necessarily be followed immediately by a pronoun that introduces an adjective clause. In other words, "agreement by proximity" is not universally applicable. In this example, "one of our Chinese members," the antecedent can be either "one" or "(our Chinese) members." I am with those linguists who argue that context and/or logical reference take(s) precedence over the importance of proximity. I think I can reasonably assume BONIERO1576, as also observed by HI Mana, was more inclined to single out jingle77 than to describe those "Chinese members" in general. (Of course BONIER is free to rebut my assumption. )

Of course many would still insist on the fixed antecedent and object to the "floating" logical reference I brought up above. That's fine and that's why there is no consensus. What everybody agrees upon, however, is when you have a construction like "I hope this is the only one of those Chinese members who is using dictionary.com," the singular usage of the verb "is" after the pronoun "who" is mandatory.

I hope this friendly discussion of fun little grammar won't derail the thread, and, more importantly, won't discourage non-native speakers like jingle77 from posting.

 

Wow, just wow...

 

Allow me one last post for this discussion of "fun little grammar",
knowing that this thread is all about salary cap.

Wnes and Hi Mana, have you guys been trained in the area of linguistics?Great analyses on the agreement problem I brought up!

One easy solution to the agreement problem caused by "floating logical reference"(Wnes' words), according to the agreement rule, is to separate the antecedent from the relative clause with a comma. This way, in a structure like " I hope one of our Chinese members, who is using dictionary.com...", it becomes much clearer that the clause "who is using dictionary.com..."defines "one of our Chinese members", not" our Chinese members".

Now time to switch back to the salary cap issue.

 

On that note, if you want to compete to Dallas's level with spending money, breaking the MLE to sign multilple players is the way to do it. If you want to expand the payroll, having these players for a year or two and possibly expanding each of them to push the payroll up would work much better than a MJ contract that would be worth next to nothing if he had a down year, at least not until his contract is to expire.

Opportunity cost and opportunity lost are so close to being mutually exclusive that I don't know why it's even an argument, except for a clever way to make a point that was totally unrelated. My argument was that the opportunity cost to sign someone to a large contract is viable if you draft them, making smart draft choices the EASIEST way to increase payroll, while meanwhile, paying the luxury tax, which I'm sure is great for alexander IF the person is worth that kind of money. Don't be so nearsighted, this team will go through ups and downs in the next 10 years and Alexander is the one whose pockets will see the changes. Until then, they're still paying players year in and year out, and they've shown no real reservations on some deals. I honestly don't believe Mike James chose Minnesota just based on the 1 year. Houston made their offer, if he doesn't take it, the Rockets made their choice and went with what they thought was best, and that was Snyder + Spanoulis + whatever's left over to make a run at Bonzi or whoever else.

For Jingle and whoever was grasping the CBA, no problem whatsoever.

 

Sometimes it makes sense to do things that others would scoff at.

I have just read this entire thread in one sitting. Wow, what can I say?

I have not learned anything new, but I have grown in wisdom, tolerance and humor.

Thanks everyone for your contributions to this board.

 

You are absolutely right that by adding a comma, you would eliminate both the lexical and logical ambiguity of the antecedent reference for the pronoun. However, in doing so, you somehow unintentionally introduce a new problem by arbitrarily replacing a restrictive clause with a nonrestrictive clause. Again using the same example, we can be pretty sure BONIERO was apparently emphasizing the "using dictionary.com" aspect, not the "our Chinese members" angle. Thus, converting to a nonrestrictive adjective clause that is omittable from the main clause would likely destroy the whole purpose.

The rule of thumb IMO is you should suck it up and stick to the more "restrictive" rule if you for instance are in school and have to deal with a hardass teacher and his/her wicked tests, but feel free to "freelance" when you are off the hook.

No, I didn't have special training in linguistics, but I think that comparing to many of my peers, I am a little more attentative to certain language details.

English is a biatch -- full of rules but with many exceptions. You learn as you go.

Oh BTW, chenli, welcome aboard.

 

LOL...we are now discussing the language skills of a poster who have criticized the language skills of another poster. This thread is truly one of a kind.

 

its threads like this and the hdtv thread in the hangout that make me love this bbs so much

great hours of entertainment