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I know the usage of

This is a new car.

This is singular.

These are some books for you.

These is plural.

Shall we use

  1. There exists some people who agree with me.

  2. There exist some people who agree with me.

Which one is the correct usage and why?

herisson
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Crazy
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    Which one do you think and why? – Kevin Aug 28 '17 at 04:26
  • I am not sure. It is because there is a plural or singular? – Crazy Aug 28 '17 at 05:28
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    I think it's one of those words that's fine either way, and there's no reason rule telling why. Similar to anyway/anyways, upward/upwards, downward/downwards, toward/towards, etc. – Jsasz Aug 28 '17 at 05:36

2 Answers2

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There exist some people who agree with me.

The subject of the sentence is people, which is plural.

Because of subject-verb-agreement, we need a plural verb to match the plural subject ("people"). The plural form of the verb is exist.

NMrt
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    I agree with the answer, but it's not clear to me that this argument is based on correct premises. FE's answer here gives some evidence for "There" being the syntactic subject of sentences like this: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/140854/there-is-there-are-depends-on-plurality-of-the-first-list-element-or-not/140863#140863 – herisson Aug 28 '17 at 16:28
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Neither. Say "There are" so you don't sound like you're acting smarter than you actually are. It's incredibly distracting when someone says "there exist(s) blank", when "there is/are blank" will do the job.

Bjorn Arnesen
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  • Hi Bjorn, welcome to our site. Please note that EL&U is not a forum for opinions, it's a library of correct answers. The question here is whether the singular or plural should be used, and you haven't addressed that in substituting one verb for another. I encourage you to [edit] your answer to respond to that specific issue. For further guidance, see [answer], and don't forget to take the [Tour] :-) – Chappo Hasn't Forgotten Nov 19 '18 at 21:54
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    While this answer does not address the question in terms of the grammatical correctness, it surely implies "there exist(s)" should be avoided. It seems like only intransitive verb usage of "exist" is listed in the dictionary. Appropriate usage in practice would be as important as grammatical correctness for ESL speakers. – Farley Nov 26 '18 at 21:55