subject verb agreement - plan of attack

[rithindas]

As I am working on this chapter in Mgmat...help me in the following

1. Collective Noun fallacy

Some collective nouns do not sound singular from insticts (are those wrong)
eg. a set of people have arrived (sounds rite) rather that a set of people has arrived

am I getting the term collective noun wrong - according to some definitions collective noun is a name of a group(like army, crowd etc)
if a set is not a collective noun can some one help me with a list of such words

[drtestprep]

A SET OF PEOPLE HAVE ARRIVED sounds right because you are confused about the SUBJECT!! What is throwing you--and what you have NOT obviously learned--is the ANY word in a PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE ("of people") CANNOT be the subject of a sentence in English. The subject of this sentence is SET and SET is singular. I suggest you learn--before you do much else--all of the prepositional phrases befoe it is too late! The Collective Nouns ARE ALWAYS SINGLAR--but you are looking in the wrong places for your subjects--period.

[JonathanSchneider]

Hm. I think the first poster might have been looking in the right place, actually, as he seemed to be asking about the word "set," but no matter...

Yes, "set" is a collective noun, just like "group." All collective nouns are singular. Some people will say that the word "police" is an exception; however, I take the word "police" to be a plural in its very nature (not a collective).

However, the previous poster may have gone a bit too far by saying that you should never look at the "of" phrase. In fact, you should check the SANAM pronouns (some, any, none, all, more/most) for possible exceptions. See page 48 of our SC strategy guide for more detail.