18 Tricky Situation: Prepositional Phrases

Subject-verb agreement is pretty easy for short, simple sentences that only contain a few words. For example, you probably wouldn’t write something like

Juan walk to work.

because the subject and verb are really close together, so it’s easy to spot the subject. You can see that the subject, Juan, is singular, so the verb should be too. The sentence should read, Juan walks to work.

But what about a sentence like this?

The protester at the front of the crowd of people confronts the officer.

Spotting the subject here (it is protester) can be a little tricky because it’s far away from the verb, and because there are other nouns in the sentence.  Many people, glancing at the sentence, might assume the plural noun people is the subject — and end up using the wrong form of the verb as a result.

But if you remember the earlier part of this book when we discussed on subjects in verbs, you will recall that the subject of a verb is never found in certain parts of a sentence. Those parts are called prepositional phrases, and there are three of them in the sentence above.

The protester at the front of the crowd of people confronts the officer.

When we’re looking for a subject, we can mentally cross out those prepositional phrases to simplify our search.

The protester at the front of the crowd of people confronts the officer.

Now that we’ve simplified the sentence, it’s easy to spot the subject (protester). The subject is singular, and the verb is singular, so they agree. The sentence is correct!

Before we move on, let’s get some practice with sentences containing prepositional phrases.