I wrote this the other day, looked back at it and wondered: - The characters you have described and their dynamic sounds interesting to me. Should it be sound or sounds? My instinct is that the plural should follow the second clause. But the first clause is singular. What is the rule?
It should be sound. As @BV says, one thing sounds interesting, whilst many things sound entertaining...for example.
sound sounds correct to my ears sounds sounds incorrect in that sentence to me the rule depends whether you are in the usa or UK or some other place. usa uses a collective noun as singular but they consider it as individuals
This particular sentence is not an example of the different way in which the US and the UK engage collective nouns. The answer is clear. Sound.
No. That sounds like an American perspective... But back to the point.... The word characters is a simple, standard plural. It is not a collective noun in any speaking region.
the word characters sounds very plural to my ear and takes the verb sound without the s being appended
maybe not the best example but i agree that sound is correct in the OP for the usa usage of agreements
Obviously "characters" is plural - it's nothing to do with your ear, it's just reality. But something being plural doesn't mean it's a collective noun. Seriously, just ease off a bit and you can start over, here. Start using capitals and punctuation, stop pretending you know more than you do, and you'll be fine. We're all just figuring stuff out--you don't need to be an expert to be a valued member of the community.
When you say "the first clause is singular", what are you referring to? "characters" is plural. If you wanted to substitute a singular noun you could say The cast you have described sounds interesting to me. I add another singular noun just for purposes of demonstration. Below, both "cast" and "setting" are singular. The cast you have described sounds interesting to me. The setting sounds interesting as well. But when you put them together, you treat the combination as plural: The cast you have described, and the setting, sound interesting to me.
But first of all I wrote it like this: The casts you have described and the settings, sounds interesting to me. Then I thought that the second clause was superfluous to the sentence; it was not an essential clause, so I thought I should put a "but" in there. The casts you have described, but the settings, sounds interesting to me. Then I had the issue with sound or sounds. I thought that I was refereeing multiple people, so at that point I should use plurals. This is the point I was unclear on. I ended up with: The casts you have described, but the settings, are sounding interesting to me.
I no longer know what your sentence means. None of your samples above are grammatically correct. Can you break the thought out into smaller pieces? What do you mean by "The characters you have described." To you, does it mean the same thing as, "You have described the characters."? So do you mean, "You have described the characters, and their dynamic sounds interesting to me." ?
I'll try. I cannot remember the full context, but i think I was trying to congratulate someone on their interesting synopsis. There were two parts to the synopsis; namely the characters and the setting. So I was intending to tell them that I found both the characters and the setting compelling. I started with: The casts you have described and the settings, sounds interesting to me, and, maybe I overthought this, but I ended up with: The casts you have described, but the settings, are sounding interesting to me. I am not quite sure how I got there, because, in my head, my intent was clear, but when I put pen to paper - or fingers to keyboard - it all came out wrong.
The "but" before "settings" communicates to me that the settings are in some way distinguished from the cast. So, the best interpretation that I can make of your last example above is that the cast was boring but the settings were interesting. What do you mean by the "but"? Edited to add: Could you please break this into two sentences, one about the cast and one about the settings? Maybe that would tell me what you mean.
I like big "buts" and I cannot lie. But I might have used them in the wrong context. I meant to say that I liked... oh I am fucking about. Sorry.
The original example was a typo, but I thought it might make an interesting discussion. Then I got drunk and started playing.
The point being made, though, is that there were no collective nouns present at the beginning of this conversation. We are all very familiar with the phenomenon of collectives and how they are treated in the UK vs. the US. Examples: U.S. - "Apple is introducing a new iPhone this month." U.K. - "Apple are introducing a new iPhone this month." Important to note, as has been noted in the past, this pluralization of collective nouns is not universal in the UK. It is a relatively new syntactic shift, on the linguistic timeline, and for many Brits this pluralization is just as jarring to the ear as it is for those of us in North America. The argument for the plural is that sometimes when referring to a singular entity like Apple, what is really being referred to is the plurality of people of which the entity is composed, but again, under no circumstances does this fly with all Brits; thus, it cannot be thought of as a rule, even in the UK, but only as a regional tendency in that area. Regardless, the initial example sentence gave us the word characters as part of the first clause. This word is not a collective and does not fall under the umbrella of the aforementioned phenomenon.