Literary Discourse In America: Error Of Concord

The Author

Introduction
Arguably, the Error of Concord is the most slippery challenge in English language usage. It transcends geographical and racial boundaries and escapes even the most grammatically conscious writers and editors.

Error of Concord is the mismatch between a verb and its subject or a pronoun and its antecedent. The subject is the doer of the action, and the action is the verb. The antecedent of a pronoun is the word that the pronoun refers to. In this discourse, emphasis is on the subject-verb (dis)agreement.

Sample
For a sample, dear reader, look at the following sentence which appears in a leading newspaper in the United States of America:

● Your commitment to her AND your love for her IS unconditional and unshakable.

Obviously, this sentence is a showcase of the Error of Concord. The following analysis justifies the claim of LITERARY DISCOURSE.

Analysis
The subject of this sentence comprises two elements: COMMITMENT and LOVE. These two elements are joined by the coordinative conjunction "and." Therefore, the subject becomes plural. Call it a compound subject, and you are right.

Ideally, the Rule of Concord demands that plural subjects take plural verbs, and singular subjects take singular verbs to ensure agreement. However, in the sentence under review, the plural subject "commitment... AND love..." is wrongly forced to agree with the singular verb "is." This amounts to an assault on the Rule of Concord. 😅😅😅!

Correction
The faulty sentence could be corrected in a number of ways. Below are some of them:

● Your commitment to her AND your love for her ARE unconditional and unshakable.

In this structure, the plural subject "commitment... and love..." rightly agrees with the plural verb "are."

● Your SENSE of commitment to her and love for her IS unconditional and unshakable.

In this sentence, the actual subject is "sense" which is singular and therefore agrees with the singular verb "is."

Note: It is instructive to explain that the phrase "of commitment to her and love for her" is only a modifier telling us more about the subject "sense." In that case, the phrase has no role in concord.

In spite of the error detected, the sentence contains a beautiful portion: the use of appropriate prepositions for appropriate nouns. These are:

● Commitment TO
AND
● Love FOR.
As we return home from America, our radar captures another interesting Error of Concord on the domestic language scene. This error is contained in a release signed by an incredibly intelligent journalist-cum-politician. See the disputed sentence:

● Extreme violence AND destruction of public property WAS reported on the campus of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).

This sentence violates the Rule of Concord because the plural subject comprising "...violence and ...destruction" goes for the singular verb "was." In this scenario, the verb choice for Concord might have been wrongly influenced by the mass noun "property" which is close to the verb. Indeed, this noun appears to be singular, but carries a plural sense.

The flawed sentence could be corrected as follows:
● Extreme violence AND destruction of public property WERE reported on the campus of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).

In the corrected version, the plural subject "...violence and ...destruction..." agrees with the plural verb "were."

Observation
Error of Concord is as slippery as typographical mistakes in the literary industry. This reminds us of some typographical mistakes that recently eluded LITERARY DISCOURSE. The first one appeared in a write-up commending lovely sister Mandy Toree for (according us) a warm reception in New York. In stead of "guess", LITERARY DISCOURSE inadvertently wrote "guest." 😅😅😅! Fortunately, our darling son, Bilal Gibril Maazu, corrected the mistake from Ghana. In the second instance, "learning" was wrongly spelt as "leaning", and "Sans frontier" was butchered as "San frontieres." Greek! Isn't it? 😅😅😅! These mistakes too were corrected by our Shaikh Sakande Mohammed Chahiroudine. We thank the two gentlemen and others who occasionally offer such corrections.

Conclusion
It is in the light of the above observation that LITERARY DISCOURSE often likens an error analyst to a police officer who, by law, arrests people for offenses but does not live above those offenses. Dear reader, let us accept the reality that we are all bound to err. Let us not feel inadequate when we are corrected. Let us learn from our errors to enhance our performance in speaking and writing.

Allah is the Best Grammarian.
By Dr. Abubakar Mohammed Marzuq Azindoo,
Lecturer, University of Applied Management, Germany - Ghana Campus, McCarthy Hill, Accra