I got to thinking today (again) that it seems grammatically incorrect to say “your change is fifty cents”, etc. However, I can see that the “fifty cents” is a predicate nominative, but it’s plural… sooo… question: is it correct to say “your change is fifty cents”, or your change are fifty cents?
What if you reverse it? fifty cents is/are your change?
Is is correct. Your change are not fifty cents (i.e., fifty pennies) but fifty cents (in any denomination of coins). The “fifty cents” is taken as one item.
Besides, whatever the predicate noun is, the subject of the sentence is “change” and that is surely a singular.
“Your change is fifteen pennies.”
“Fifteen pennies are your change.”
Both are correct. The verb follows the subject.
Actually change with the meaning “money returned in a transaction” is not singular, but neither is it plural. It’s a collective (non-count) noun. But collective nouns are generally treated as singular grammatically, so this is really more of a nitpick than anything else.
Not in Britain, where “the audience are applauding” is the Queen’s English.
Also Canada- I recall a hockey TV annoncer say," The crowd are cheering."
The comittee are deciding.
What if we turned the statement around. “Fifty cents is your change” sounds correct to me. “Fifty cents are your change” just doesn’t sound right, but I can’t justify it. Which is correct?
Yeah, well if the Queen had been in Mrs. Duvall’s English class, she’d know better. Mrs. Duvall would have set her straight about how to use first person singular, too.
Oops, my mistake. I used the wrong term. Not collective noun but rather mass noun. Those are treated as singular, even by the Ukogbani.
The examples given above (audience, crowd, committee) are collective nouns and are not the same as mass nouns. Sorry about any confusion I caused.
“The National Institutes[b/] of Health is conducting a survey…"
"The Centers** for Disease Control is saying…”
No matter how many times I hear this on the radio, I’ll never, never get used to it.
Is is correct. Fifty cents is taken as one unit, unless you are actually referring to fifty individual pennies.