Wednesday, March 16, 2016

grammar - Function of Numbers in a Sentence



A question was recently posed about the sentence



"This is what 51,000 people looks like."




The question was, "Is this grammatical?"



It seems opinions vary on how to handle this sentence. I feel that 51,000 is an adjective describing people and so "looks" should be "look" as in "This is what 51,000 people look like."



These are my questions:



1) What function does 51,000 serve in the sentence?
2) How are numbers treated in general when they appear before nouns? I ask because I have heard people say "Here's 30 Dollars." Should it be "is" or "are?" Seems like people are referring to "30" and not "Dollars."
3) What function does "look" play in the above sentence?

4) Also, it seems that because 51,000 is written as a number (instead of fifty one thousand) people are treating it like a group whereas if it were written, I think it would be harder to do that. Does writing it as a number or as words change things?
5) Also, if the sentence were "Here is what 51,000 people looks like." would the word "here" change the sentence and how we parse the it?


Answer




  1. Quantifiers generally act as determinatives, which define the nouns they modify. This is different from adjectives, which describe the nouns they modify. You can tell the difference because determinatives cannot be inflected for comparison, and they can't appear as predicate adjectives. You can say either




Purple people are here or People here are purple





but you can only say




51,000 people are here.




You can't say





People here are 51,000.





  1. Whether you hand someone a twenty-dollar bill or a two ten-dollar bills, you say




Here is twenty dollars.





Because that's a single amount, no matter the denomination of the bills.




  1. "Look" is a stative verb in your example. It means "appears."


  2. I don't see how numerals or words affect the grammar. Whether you choose a singular or plural verb depends on whether you mean the group as a whole or as multiple individuals. If you say





51,000 people seems small for a protest rally





you mean that it's a small crowd.
If you say




51,000 people seem small




you mean that either they are all midgets or they are being viewed from afar.





  1. "Here" is an adverb of place, telling us where they people appear as they do. Its presence or absence doesn't change the basic structure of the sentence.


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