Grammar

A small number of quantifiers are a bit confusing, perhaps.

Doing some research for a post I want to do on linking verbs, I came across this sentence:

There is a small number of other copular verbs

which just happened to be on an English university grammar course website, which is a bit ironic.

Now I was pretty sure I'd say 'There are a small number', even though it doesn't seem at first sight to be grammatically correct – we have that 'a', after all. So I started checking on the web.

The first thing I found was in Yahoo Answers (a discussion board), where the answer was unanimous - a number is singular, so the verb must be singular – it's all so simple, isn't it? But I wasn't convinced, so I tried Google Ngram, my favourite internet toy tool, and this was the result (green and blue are for are, red and yellow for is – you can click on it to enlarge)

That looked more like what I was expecting, so I did what I (and those people on Yahoo) should have done in the first place, and checked a dictionary. Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary has a very useful note:

A plural verb is needed after 'a/an (large, small, etc.) number of…'

And on another website I found the comment that: "A number of" is just a fuzzy [not precise] quantifier, but he pointed out this difference (my examples):

A number of incidents have happened in the last few weeks.
The number of incidents has increased recently.

In the first sentence it's the incidents that have happened, so we need a plural verb. But in the second sentence it is the number that has increased, so we need a singular verb. And with the there is / are construction, we have:

There have been a number of incidents in the last few weeks.
There has been an increase in the number of incidents recently.

So usually, a number of is acting as a quantifier, and takes a plural verb, whereas the number of refers to the singular noun number,and so takes a singular verb. But be careful of phrases like this:

When truncating, a number of this order of magnitude is between ... (Wikipedia)

Here we are talking about the number, it is not acting as a quantifier, so we use singular. However, having just googled it, I can tell you that this sort of sentence is pretty rare.

Confusion reigns

If you try a Google search for "there is a small number" "there are a small number", you'll find that the two versions are occasionally used in the same article, with absolutely no difference in meaning - Google search - so it's obvious that a lot of people are confused.

Other similar quantifiers

In fact we use quite a few quantifiers with 'a' and a plural noun and/or plural pronoun, usually with a plural verb:

A number of people have complained that they were badly treated
A few of us are going to the cinema. Do you want to come?
He's written several books, and a couple of them are really good.
A lot of young people in that town are unemployed.
A small majority of members have voted in favour of the measure.

But note the informal there's a

In informal speech, we sometimes use there is before plural nouns:

There's a couple of things I don't understand.
There's an awful lot of people in the street.
There's a number of things we need to do.

And the moral of this tale – if you want grammatical advice, don't go to discussion boards

Links

Yahoo Answers
Alt-Usage-English.org
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Grammar