Subject Verb agreement

In a correct sentence

1. Subject and verb must both exist- eg. These proposals were approved during the board meeting, "Proposals" is subject here and "approved" is verb of the subject. Let us take another example - The bridge named in 2002 - "named"   here is not a working verb, because named here is past participle and can not be a working verb on its own, but if we tweak the above fragment a bit - The bridge was named in 2002 - we have a working verb her - "was named". Let us consider another fragment - "Because the pen was never mine" - "because" is a connecting word and "the pen was mine" is the Main Clause (A clause can stand as a sentence containing a subject and verb). The word "because" makes the main clause a subordinate clause, thus making the whole a fragment.
2. Subject and verb must agree in number: Subject and verb must either both be singular or plural.
3. Of course they must make sense together

AND vs Additive phrase

• The word and can unite 2 or more singular subjects, forming a compound plural subject
• Many other additive phrase such as along with, in addition to, as well as, including etc can "add" to a subject but unlike and they do not form compound subject and therefore cannot change the number of subject
• Only the word and can change a singular subject into a plural one

OR, EITHER ... OR and NEITHER ... NOR

•   These phrases link nouns, so if both their numbers are same then no problem in deciding the verb form but if one noun is singular and other is plural then the noun closer to verb decides the verb form.
• When the words either or neither are in sentence alone (without or or nor), they are considered singular and take only singular verbs

COLLECTIVE NOUNS (agency, army, audience, class, committee, crowd, orchestra, team, baggage, citrus, equipment, fleet, fruit, furniture etc) are almost always singular

INDEFINITE PRONOUNS

• Indefinite pronouns such as anyone, anybody, anything, no one, nobody, nothing, someone, somebody, something, everyone, everybody, everything (ending in -one, -body, -thing), whatever, whoever, each, every are considered singular and require singular verb form.
• There are however, 5 indefinite pronouns - ASMAN (Any, Some, More/Most, All, None) - that can be either singular or plural depending on context. The 'Of-phrase' decides the number of ASMAN(you may appreciate it if you are a seinfeld freak) eg. Some of the speakers were there.
• Technically, none of + plural noun can take either a singular or a plural verb form. But not one is always singular.

EACH and EVERY

• Any subject preceded by the word each or every is singular, eg. Every dog and cat has paws.
• The word each following a subject has no bearing on the verb form, eg. They each are great tennis player.

QUANTITY WORDS and PHRASES

• The phrase The number of takes singular verb, but A number of takes a plural verb.
• In many idiomatic expressions that designate quantities or parts, the subject of the sentence is in an Of-prepositional phrase, eg. Half of the slices are already gone.
• The words majority, minority and plurality, are either singular (if totality is indicated) or plural (if individual part of the totality is indicated).

That is all for today, Parallelism next