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Being rich and famous certainly has/have some advantages.

Being rich and being famous certainly has/have some advantages.

Being enormous and being made of rare materials is/are why this throne is so expensive.

Which is the right form of verb to use in each of these sentences and why?

TheAnanyo
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1 Answers1

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One Non-Finite Clause as a Subject? Singular Verb

To study this question more closely, I went to the News on the Web (NOW) Corpus, ran a search for "Being rich and famous" (139 results). Out of the results, when the non-finite clause was a subject, every verb was singular. Here are some examples:

Being rich and famous is not a marker of success

Being rich and famous comes with a few unexpected downsides

Being rich and famous awards you a fair bit of wiggle room

In each case, the non-finite clause (ones headed by an infinitive or participial form; see Wikipedia) takes a singular verb, even if the clause has multiple or plural elements within (see Celce-Murcia, Larsen-Freeman, Williams, The Grammar Book, p. 66).

Two Non-Finite Clauses as a Subject? Usually a Plural Verb

Take this example:

Being rich and being famous are sufficient for Bob to be happy. (Causey, Logic, Sets, and Recursion, 2006).

In this case, two nonfinite clauses connected by and are treated as plural rather than singular. That would govern both your second and third examples.

This construction is unusual though; I wouldn't be surprised to see a native speaker say something like

Being rich and being famous is sufficient for Bob to be happy

because they think of it in a singular mode or pertaining to only one entity (Bob), a form of notional agreement or determining agreement by meaning. (For more exploration of those possibilities, the question "Singular vs. Plural with Multiple Gerunds as Subject (IE: [Gerund] and [Gerund] are/is [something].)" explores some possibilities).

TaliesinMerlin
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  • Being rich and famous is not a conjoined clause; it's got a conjoined predicate adjective, but once conjunction reduction has removed the replicated being, there's only one clause and of course it's singular. And even leaving it in, it's still just a conjoined verb phrase, not two clauses. – John Lawler Apr 14 '23 at 14:30
  • @JohnLawler I agree. I treated Being rich and famous as a single clause. Otherwise, we're getting into a terminology debate, and I'm open to correction. Whether you call being rich and being famous two conjoined non-finite clauses or a conjoined verb phrase, it usually takes the plural. – TaliesinMerlin Apr 14 '23 at 15:22