Thrissel wrote:@ Nìall Beag: So if I Google "but the majority of them is" and get half a million hits, does it mean that all of those are by erring non-native speakers, or that in "the majority of them" the qualifier is the pronoun?
Half a million?!? Well, I won't be able to check them all individually, but let's look at the first page.
Leaving aside the grammar question pages, the first I get is a
gaming page. The original question is posed with "are" by a guy who's English is indistinguishable from native. It is later repeated as "are" by someone whose grammar is distinctly non-native (eg
Buddhist pantheon is one of the pantheon that go more against Cristianity and neither have so many similiar legends (like Hindu and Cristian). -- "one of the" plus singular: mistake. "Neither" as opposite of "also": mistake. Incorrect use of "like" as comparison.)
Second hit is an
Italian academic journal collection, and the rest of the clause gives it away as non-native:
available in both paper form and in the electronic version. Several problems: "in the electronic version" should be "in digital format" ("version" implies differences in content, whereas "format" implies difference only in medium and presentation; "the" is too specific as we're talking about the articles in general, not specific articles; electronic vs digital isn't strictly wrong, but it still feels quite non-native)
The third hit (again excluding the grammar discussions) is
more telling.
I think indifference towards the majority of them is important
Here it is the indifference that is important, not the majority.
I would suspect that the majority of hits are either non-native or merely a fragment of a larger and more complex clause.
I can't say for sure whether the
wikipedia article was native-written or non-native-written, and grammar's always messed up there anyway (too many cooks spoil the broth).
On page two I see
one forum post that
might be a native using it that way, several non-natives and even more sequences where the "is" follows "the majority of them" but refers to something else in the sentence.
The
British National Corpus has only one hit for "the majority of them is", and that isn't the pattern you're looking for: "that's the attitude of the majority of them, isn't it?" whereas there's 10 hits for "the majority of them are", and they're all the structure we're looking for.
Of course, I wouldn't rule out that some of the Google hits are genuinely that structure, and written by native speakers, but if so, I would put it down to "hypercorrectness" -- they're trying to follow the rules of grammar, and therefore inadvertently breaking rules they don't know exist.
(The existence of the class of "quantifiers" isn't widely taught, and even a lot of people who talk about quantifiers stick to just the single-word ones. This was the basis of one of the corpus tasks I had to do for English grammar at uni, although we focussed on "a lot of", and sure enough, the pattern is real.)