Singular or Plural: 'A number of' versus 'The number of'

Here come two sentences with distinct meanings:

1. The number of social problems is rising sharply during financial downturn.
2. A number of social problems are caused by financial downturn.

In sentence 1, the subject is 'number' specified by the determiner 'the', so 'is' is the verb-to-be to keep the agreement. In sentence 2, the subject is 'social problems', and the phrase 'a number of' is a quantifier to modify the subject 'social problem’. Therefore, the verb-to-be is 'are'.

Again, it shows how the article 'the' and 'a' have the specific and general reference respectively.

Negative yes/no questions

One of the uses of a negative yes/no question is in the case that you expect the answer to be ‘Yes’, i.e. suggesting an affirmative verb. The following provides some examples:

'During these warm but comfortable autumn days, haven’t we all seen thousands of people walking round in jumpers and jackets, probably because they fear having to go into some refrigerated building/” ( = We have all seem…..)'

'But the title of this book is a bit odd: wasn’t cross-border finance the last, rather disappointing, globalization? (=Cross-border finance was the last……) '

This expression is for emphasizing the writer’s standpoint or belief.

'Then' is not a conjunction

I find that some students mistreat the word ‘then’ as a conjunction. So, they can mistakenly have the following sentence pattern.

'I overslept this morning, then I was late for work.'

Although ‘then’ and ‘so’ both have the meaning of ‘since that is the case’, they cannot be used in the same way. The former is an adverb while the latter is a conjunction. As a result, the above sentence can be written in the following either ways:

'I overslept this morning, so I was late for work.'
'I overslept this morning, and then I was late for work.'

Although in an informal style the word 'and' can be dropped, it holds for that with ellipsis. For example,

'David worked first, (and) then Susan (worked).

No 'the' for society

Some students asked if there are some exceptional cases for the word 'society' with the determiner 'the', even though the word stands for the environment we are living in. For example, we are talking about something very specific to a society such as its particular member.

The answer is definitely no. Perhaps I give you one more convincing example after all. In 2009 UE Reading Comprehension, in the article there is one sentence as follows:

'Two young children pretending together that a stick is a horse have thus taken their first step not only on an imaginary journey, but also toward becoming a functioning member of society.’

Even in the above specific expression, there is no need to add 'the' in front of 'society'. See!?

Use of Comma

In 2009 UE proofreading, there is a sentence as follows:

He said the vases were very, very small pieces but they were determined to put them back towards together.’

The errors, of course, do not happen in such an obvious place as ‘very, very’ in the sentence. But some students are curious about whether they could write it in this way.

Students can do so as long as they add a comma. In fact, we can use comma to separate words repeated for emphasis and words that may be misread if not separated. The following is another example:

The building is a long, long way from completion.

Double Negatives

A student asked me why there could be such a sentence in the song of ‘A Certain Romance’ by Arctic Monkeys:

The point’s that there ain’t no romance around there.

Students said, ‘The theme of the song reveals that there is no romance. How come there appear two negatives, ‘ain’t’ and ‘no’？’

The reason is that in many British, American and other dialects, they use two or more negatives for a single meaning. The following is another example:

I ain’t found nobody in the room.

It has the same meaning as ‘I haven’t found anybody in the room’. Note that such use applies only in oral English, rarely in written English.