I wrote the following sentence:
One or more of these has to be blue. (OK, I just made that up.)
My thinking was the primary subject is “One” and the secondary subject is “or more” and the verb/subject agreement should be One of these has to be blue. MSWord said it should be “have”.
I don’t really have any emotion attached to my choice, I just want to be sure I understand the rule.
At least one has to be true.
I’d go with “has,” for the reason you state.
twicks, who likes to think her grammar is better than a computer program’s.
Would you say:
“One or two of these has to be blue.”
“One or two of these have to be blue.”
The answer to this question would dictate the answer to your question.
Or, restate the sentence as follows:
“One or more has to be blue.”
“One or more have to be blue.”
Which might help by removing the confusing intervening construction “of these.”
I would also have to say “has.”
It’s like when I say “Mary and I went to the store.” The reason it’s not “Mary and me” is that I"d never go anywhere with that slut. No, seriously, you break it down into “I went to the store” and “Mary went to the store.”
Similarly, in “One or more of these has to be blue,” you would say “One of these has to be blue” and “More of these. . . .” Uh, wait, that doesn’t work.
HELP
How about:
One or more of these must be true?
For one or more as the subject, I would go with have as the verb because the usual thing is to have the verb agree with the last subject in a list of subjects joined by or.
The rule is usually that the subject closer to the verb sets the number ==> “have”.
John or his sons have bought a new Wii.
This is one of those cases where it is guaranteed that some fraction of your intended audience will be distacted by “has” and some fraction by “have”. You should go with the one that distacts either the smaller or less important set of people.
ETA: I say “less important” here because of a similar situation I face with the “data is”/“data are” distinction. It’s usually the non-scientists who cringe at “data are”, but that is usually a non-critical part of the audience when I’m talking about data.
I agree. I could swear the term for this is “proximal agreement,” but a search for that phrase on Google, along with “grammar,” only results in three hits. Granted, the three hits are on point, but there must be some other term for it that’s more widely accepted.
Note: I changed the url in the last link in the 2nd quote because the original link goes to the pronunciation of the suffix ~or, not to the lexical word or. I felt the need to edit the thing because this, after all, is the Straight Dope!
Now a comment of my own on parallel construction: I think the agreement issue arises from over-applying or misapplying the use of parallel construction. For example:
This gives no problem with agreement. Now look at these two sentences conjoined by or:
That last sentence gives no problem with agreement either. But if you (over-) apply parallel construction to it:
And that brings us to the issue of this thread.
To think some people tell me Linguistics isn’t fun.
Not sure if you’re joking, but your example is different because the difference between “I” and “me” is that of subject/object. The difference between “has” and “have” is singular vs. plural. If two people are involved in a “Name and <self>” construction, they’ll always both be the object, or both be the subject. If two different quantities of things are joined by “or”, they might not be the same plurality.
Number, not plurality. Plurality is the state of being in the plural number. Also, some languages distinguish between singular, dual, plural, etc.