· Rosa and her brother have identical IQs , and they both have PhDs from Harvard.

· She has over 400 URLs * in her bookmark file.

Singular Subjects, Plural Predicates, etc.

We frequently run into a situation in which a singular subject is linked to a plural predicate:

· My favorite breakfast is cereal with fruit, milk, orange juice, and toast .

Sometimes, too, a plural subject can be linked to singular predicate:

· Mistakes in parallelism are the only problem here.

In such situations, remember that the number (singular or plural) of the subject, not the predicate, determines the number of the verb. See the section on Subject-Verb Agreement for further help.

A special situation exists when a subject seems not to agree with its predicate. For instance, when we want each student to see his or her counselor (and each student is assigned to only one counselor), but we want to avoid that "his or her" construction by pluralizing, do we say "Students must see their counselors " or "Students must see their counselor "? The singular counselor is necessary to avoid the implication that students have more than one counselor apiece. Do we say "Many sons dislike their father or fathers "? We don't mean to suggest that the sons have more than one father, so we use the singular father. Theodore Bernstein, in Dos, Don'ts and Maybes of English Usage , says that "Idiomatically the noun applying to more than one person remains in the singular when (a) it represents a quality or thing possessed in common ("The audience's curiosity was aroused"); or (b) it is an abstraction ("The judges applied their reason to the problem"), or (c) it is a figurative word ("All ten children had a sweet tooth ") (203). Sometimes good sense will have to guide you. We might want to say "Puzzled, the children scratched their head" to avoid the image of multi-headed children, but "The audience rose to their foot" is plainly ridiculous and about to tip over.

In "The boys moved their car/cars," the plural would indicate that each boy owned a car, the singular that the boys (together) owned one car (which is quite possible). It is also possible that each boy owned more than one car. Be prepared for such situations, and consider carefully the implications of using either the singular or the plural. You might have to avoid the problem by going the opposite direction of pluralizing: moving things to the singular and talking about what each boy did.

Conclusion

Our course work was investigated from different kind of sources. We chose exactly nouns as a subject of investigation because we think that it is not completely investigated. Whether or not a noun is uncountable is determined by its meaning: an uncountable noun represents something which tends to be viewed as a whole or as a single entity, rather than as one of a number of items which can be counted as individual units. Singular verb forms are used with uncountable nouns. The indefinite articles a, an and numbers are not normally used with uncountable nouns , e.g. My grammar checker gave me a useful feed back. Please give me an information about how to access the library on the web. (The plural form some could, however, be used here –I need some information about…..)There are several ways to express quantity for uncountable nouns, e.g. I read an interesting news this morning. An interesting item of news Could I borrow a paper to make notes? A sheet/a piece of paper Teachers should be able to give students useful advices about oral presentations. some useful advice.

Appendix

Nouns that can be Countable and Uncountable

Sometimes, the same noun can be countable and uncountable, often with a change of meaning.

Countable	Uncountable
There are two hairs in my coffee!	hair	I don't have much hair.
There are two lights in our bedroom.	light	Close the curtain. There's too much light!
Shhhhh! I thought I heard a noise.	noise	It's difficult to work when there is too much noise.
Have you got a paper to read? (= newspaper)	paper	I want to draw a picture. Have you got some paper?
Our house has seven rooms.	room	Is there room for me to sit here?
We had a great time at the party.	time	Have you got time for a coffee?
Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's greatest works.	work	I have no money. I need work!

Uncountable Nouns

Uncountable nouns are substances, concepts etc that we cannot divide into separate elements. We cannot "count" them. For example, we cannot count "milk". We can count "bottles of milk" or "litres of milk", but we cannot count "milk" itself. Here are some more uncountable nouns:

· music, art, love, happiness

· advice, information, news

· furniture, luggage

· rice, sugar, butter, water

· electricity, gas, power

· money, currency

We usually treat uncountable nouns as singular. We use a singular verb. For example:

· This news is very important.

· Your luggage looks heavy.

We do not usually use the indefinite article a/an with uncountable nouns. We cannot say "an information" or "a music". But we can say a something of :

· a piece of news

· a bottle of water

· a grain of rice

We can use some and any with uncountable nouns:

· I've got some money.

· Have you got any rice?

We can use a little and much with uncountable nouns: