Okay, I’m a guy who usually has a respectable grasp of grammar usage. But something that always stumps me is the noun-verb agreement in sentences that contain phrases enclosed in parentheses or dashes.
Can such a phrase turn an otherwise singular subject plural? Or does the verb “ignore” the parentetical phrase? Allow me to illustrate.
Which is correct?:
My mother (and her dog) rides the bus every morning.
or…
My mother (and her dog) ride the bus every morning.
Does the answer change if the parentheses are replaced with dashes?:
My mother – and her dog – rides the bus every morning.
or…
My mother – and her dog – ride the bus every morning.
I’m really confused by your examples. I can’t imagine when I would use parentheses or dashes to talk about “mom and her dog”. My vote is to get rid of the extra punctuation and say “are”.
I’m probably missing something. Do you have another example?
Bob, agreed, my sample sentence would read better without the parens or dashes if it stood alone.
But, say, in the context of a bigger story where the emphasis is on my mother’s daily activities, it would be quite acceptable. The dog is mentioned merely for the sake of telling all the facts and perhaps to add a little color. But, because the pooch has little or nothing to do with the flow of the story he is relegated to a parenthetical phrase.
Now, to insure that this does not get hijacked into a debate between me and Bob I’m willing to plead nolo contendere (hope I got that right) to the charge that my example could have been better.
So, where is it that you live that allows dogs on the bus? Or is it a case where your mother is blind, and the dog is a guide dog? In that case it might be better to say, “The dog (when traveling with my mother) rides the bus.”
Otherwise I would avoid the construction which sounds wrong when read aloud, since listeners cannot see parentheses
MS word will flag, “My mother (and her dog) ride the bus.” It prefers rides. I prefer to rewrite the sentence. “Even when she rides the bus, my mother takes the dog.”
Please, please, people. With all due respect for the rewriters among you, let the example stand for the sake of this question. It’s a valid construction so leave it be.
So far, missbunny votes “ride.”
MS Word (hmmm… is she a registered Doper?) votes “rides.”
It’s definintely “rides” in both sentences. Parenthetical references are similar to modifiers and nonrestrictive elements in that they do not affect the number of the subject. The subject is singular, so it takes a singular verb.
Hmmm, now I’m wavering - “rides” seems correct depending on how the sentence is said. I was “hearing” it as “My mother and her dog ride the bus,” with the same emphasis on all the words. However, if it is spoken with the most emphasis on “my mother” and “and the dog” is just a not-very-important addition - then “rides” seems correct. I did a quick look in a grammar book but couldn’t find anything on this particular situation.
I’m going to vote with The Prisoner here, if I’m understanding the question correctly. A parenthetical phrase doesn’t always flow with the sentence as easily as that given as an example. I think more in terms of an aside.
I know some guys who like to (and you thought I was crazy) bounce down the highway in a welded steel cage pushed from the back of a pickup truck (Master of Sparks bubbling up for anyone?).
Of course, as soon as I’ve typed that I see that one difference between the OP’s example and mine are that mine include subject-verb-object phrases specific to the parenthetical insert.
Would one in some cases drop the insertions when reading it aloud, or rely on pauses, inflection, etc. to communicate what part is parenthetical?
In your examples, “mother” is the subject, and “dog” is not part of the subject. The correct verb is “rides,” without a doubt. As others have said, IF the punctuation were eliminated, it’d be a different story:
My mother and her dog RIDE the bus.
This is now a compound subject connected by the conjunction “and.” By adding the parentheses or dashes, you create a parenthetical phrase, which by definition cannot be part of the subject. The correct choice is therefore the singular form of the verb–“rides.”
First, the answer can be discerned from the definition of parenthetic, which the OED defines as:
Not particularly helpful, until you look up the definition of parenthesis:
(bolding mine) The key being the “no connexion” (even if the British do spell it wrong). Since there is no grammatical connection between “and her dog” and the subject of the sentence, “my mother,” the verb agrees with the singular subject and should be “rides.”
This example is similar to yours except that the “and” has been replaced with “along with,” which, in my opinion, is a better construction because it avoids the confusion.
And, did anyone else find it humorous that Beatle screwed up the noun-verb agreement in his post? “ONE difference…ARE…” Some kind of strange grammatical Freudian slip.
