Of the 85 political essays that comprise The Federalist Papers, it is

Question

Of the 85 political essays that comprise  The Federalist Papers , it is certain that Hamilton wrote 51 of them, Madison, 14, and Jay, five; historians  have a dispute about the authorship of  the remaining fifteen.

A. have a dispute about the authorship of
B. have a dispute with the authorship of
C. dispute about the authorship of
D. dispute the authorship of
E. are in dispute about the authorship of

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Bunuel · Answer

OFFICIAL EXPLANATION

Answer: D.

When dispute is used as a noun, the idiom is “dispute over” an issue or “dispute with” another person. “Dispute about” is unidiomatic and it is illogical for historians to have a dispute “with the authorship” as in choice B.

Purvidebuka · Answer

Hi Experts, I wonder if there's a way to differentiate between a verb and a noun in such questions? I presupposed 'Dispute' to be a noun, and so didn't opt for option D but turns out it's the right choice. My apologies if I am being dense here, but I tend to struggle with identifying nouns and verbs in such scenarios.

AndrewN · Answer

It is not a silly question at all,  Purvidebuka . Knowing how to identify a word as a noun or a verb is vital to success on the SC task. In general, you can identify a noun form of a word that may also be a verb by what precedes it: an article (a/an, the), a pronoun (this, its), or a possessive. An example of the latter in this sentence could be  historians' dispute  (note the apostrophe). Granted, the majority of such possessive constructs end up being incorrect, but there is nothing grammatically unsound about placing an apostrophe after a noun to indicate possession, and, again, the word that follows will be a noun, unless there are modifiers attached. (In the case of the historians, you could just as easily say  their dispute .)

Unless there is a list of some sort, you should not encounter a noun and another noun back to back. Since, just prior to the underlined portion,  historians  is clearly a noun, the subject of the second clause, we can anticipate that a verb will follow to tell us either what historians are doing or how this group can be described (e.g.,  Historians are intelligent ). Look at the answer choices again, at the first few words in particular, right up to  dispute :

There is no disputing that  have  in the original sentence, as well as in (B), is a verb. We are expecting the next bit of information to tell us what, exactly, these historians have. Notice the article  a  that precedes our word in question, a dead giveaway that  dispute  is used as a noun. Answer choices (C) and (D) lack any article or other way for us to identify  dispute  as anything but a verb, not to mention that the sentence would be getting into ungrammatical noun + noun territory. (Aside: Even two seemingly apparent back-to-back nouns present an  adjective  (modifier) and noun pair instead:   video game  controller ,   whale  shark ,   tin  roof .) Finally, answer choice (E) uses the auxiliary verb  are  to define or describe the historians, and it slides into a prepositional phrase that omits the article—it would be just as acceptable to say that  historians are in  a  dispute . Still, the preposition  in  tells us that the word that follows will be a noun or modifier (adjective, adverb), since a verb cannot be  in  anything.

It is worth taking extra time to study grammatical structure so that you can always, or nearly always, identify a subject and verb that together form the backbone of a sentence. Except for dialogue, which is not tested in SC, no sentence can be formed without these two components.

Good luck with your studies.

- Andrew

vv65 · Answer

Then you have learnt something new: that DISPUTE can be used as a verb or as a noun.

There are many such words: for example INFLUENCE, COMPROMISE, PROMISE, BOAST, QUARREL, QUESTION, ... even WALK and TALK!

The sentence with the verb form is usually more concise and hence preferred. 
 - The minister promised to help.
- The minister made a promise to help. 
The first ⬆️ is better, but the second isn't wrong.

Sometimes the noun and verb forms have slightly different meanings.
 - The minister is talking.
- The minister is giving a talk. 
In this case we will need to see which meaning better fits the sentence.

Posted from my mobile device

VerbalBot · Answer

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Of the 85 political essays that comprise The Federalist Papers, it is

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Of the 85 political essays that comprise The Federalist Papers, it is

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