A tricky case of subject-verb agreement

Question

Itam12 from Israel asked, “In the definition for hall below, why is lead, the plural form, used instead of leads, the singular form?”

(A hall is) a usually long, narrow passage inside a building with doors that lead to rooms on the sides.

Answer

Thank you for this challenging question. The short answer is that lead is correct. But why?

Here’s an explanation: As you know, in English a singular noun takes a singular verb, and a plural noun takes a plural verb. Therefore, to determine whether lead should be singular or plural, we simply have to identify its subject and determine whether it is singular or plural. However, in this particular case, finding the subject is a little tricky, for the following reasons:

1. Lead is part of a dependent clause (“that lead to rooms on both sides”).
2. The grammatical subject of this dependent clause is the pronoun that.
3. That isn’t singular or plural. It takes its number from its antecedent, that is, the noun it refers to in the main clause, which is the underlying, or “real,” subject of lead.

In other words, whether lead should be singular or plural depends on whether the antecedent of that – the underlying subject of lead – is singular or plural. To find this antecedent, let’s examine the possible choices and figure out which one makes the most logical sense.

In the definition of hall shown above, there are three nouns to consider:

1. building

Building cannot be the subject of lead, because it doesn’t make sense to say “a building leads to rooms.”

2. passage

Passage cannot be the subject of lead, because that would make the group of words in-between passage and that (“inside a building with doors”) a grammatical unit, and they don’t make sense as a unit.

3. doors

Doors makes sense as the subject of lead because it is perfectly logical to say “doors lead to rooms.” Therefore, doors must be the underlying, or “real” subject of lead. And doors is plural, which makes the plural verb, lead, correct.

One last thought: The definition of hall that we started should probably have a comma added after building, which would make it easier to understand that doors is the subject of lead:

A hall is a usually long, narrow passage inside a building, with doors that lead to rooms on the sides.

I hope this helps.