Multiple nouns modified by a single adjective phrase — singular or plural?

Question

I am editing a book and have come across a sentence of the form:

The Urban Gothic: A Good Life CD and book are available from channel4.com.

To be clear, the CD and the book are products sold separately; however, the CD is an audio recording of the text of the book, which is itself an adaptation of a single, standalone work.

Should the nouns 'CD' and 'book' be plural: 'DVDs' and 'books'? Or am I missing another solution to render this sentence grammatical? Or is it grammatical already?

I feel like this is an embarrassingly simple question, but for the life of me I can't figure it out.

No: they should not be plural.The article "a" marks the individual coordinates as being singular, but the coordination is of course plural, hence the plural verb "are". The implication is that more than one of each item is available. — BillJ, Nov 16 '20 at 16:30
Arguably a duplicate of Why do we use 'the' followed by 'user' in 'a window prompts the user to make ...?? Here, 'The Urban Gothic: A Good Life: the CD' and 'The Urban Gothic: A Good Life: the book' (expanding the deletions into appositives) are generic usages. 'The CD and the book are both available.' — Edwin Ashworth, Dec 16 '20 at 16:27
"Urban Gothic: A Good Life" is available both as an audio CD and book from channel4.com." — Greybeard, Apr 18 '21 at 11:20
You'd say "The book is available", "The CD and book are available", so you can build up a longer sentence. — Stuart F, Dec 14 '21 at 09:52

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 16 '20 at 15:48

1

'CD and book are available' is fine, assuming you mean multiple copies of a single recording and a single text. Making the words plural would imply that there are several related books/CDs.

answered Nov 16 '20 at 15:48

Kate Bunting

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Multiple nouns modified by a single adjective phrase — singular or plural?

1 Answers1