DmitryFarber wrote:
Skywalker18 The idea here is that there was no one
like Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters. From the context, one can guess that these women, unlike pre-Colette French writers, were not from aristocratic families. Rather, they were the daughters of clergymen. It would be like if you said "There are no Donald Trumps in my family." This would just mean that no one in your family is like that.
As for the conjunction "or" it does not create a plural compound subject, so we can't use S-V to eliminate C-E. The problem with most of the choices is the way the conjunction is used. We need to say that there was no one like any of these women. E implies that there was EITHER no Austen OR no Brontes. That's not what we want at all. B and C are simply saying that those actual women weren't present, and that isn't the point. (Also, the plural "Austens" doesn't work in B without the idiom "there were no X.") Then, to answer your question in 3, the parallelism of "not a Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters" is flawed. If we aren't talking about the actual Austen in the first part, we shouldn't shift to talking about the actual Bronte Sisters in the second. We could perhaps say "There was not a Jane Austen nor any Bronte sisters."
Hello
DmitryFarber,
I have a question regarding this part "
As for the conjunction "or" it does not create a plural compound subject, so we can't use S-V to eliminate C-E" , I thought that when we had structures like these either....or , neither... nor , not...nor etc. we would focus on the last element and based on its number we would decide whether singular or plural should be used, in our case we have
was not Jane Austen nor the Bronte sisters, so it would be the same with
Jane Austen nor the Bronte sisters was, and that would be incorrect because Bronte sisters is plural, so why can't we eliminate C-E because of S-V agreement.