"My son and I are. " or "My son and I am. "? [closed]

This question should include more details than have been provided here. Please edit to add the research you have done in your efforts to answer the question, or provide more context. See: Details, Please.

My son and I are your fans.
My son and I am your fans.

• subject-verb-agreement
• grammatical-number

3 Answers 3

Deciding which verb form to use in the predicate is almost always a matter of simple maths. A singular subject takes a singular verb, and a plural subject takes a plural verb. Taking your sentence apart, we have a subject phrase:

We also have a predicate phrase:

The first and most important question here is: How many people are described in the subject phrase "My son and I?"

The answer is two, and 2 is greater than 1. This means that it is a plural subject. The plural form of the present tense of the verb to be is are. This means that the correct and normal construction is:

My son and I are your fans.

This can be confusing to new learners of English, perhaps because they have learned to conjugate to be as:

Singular:
I am
You are
He/she/it is

Plural:
We are
You are
They are

Now they are presented with a sentence which contains I are! How can this possibly be correct? English is too confusing!

The simple rule to follow is: A singular subject takes a singular verb, and a plural subject takes a plural verb.

Well, there are some contexts where it's not exactly straightforward to decide whether some noun phrase should take a singular or plural verb. There's my “There is/are more than one”. What's the difference? for one. Where I quite enjoyed being able to irrelevantly include species (which just happens to be both singular and plural, to add to the confusion! :)

Almost always a reliable sidekick! It's not essential, but it's almost always best to deploy him in the first wave (with backup in case he gets cut down by "Hardly ever!" or "Not where I come from!" in the initial fray! :)

First of all, not funs. It should be fans. You probably just misspelled it.

And it should be are, of course, because we are talking about more than one person.

My son and I are your big fans.

Mark and I are going to Paris.
She and I are very good friends.
John and I are coworkers.

Not my -1, but In English, we almost never place the first person pronoun first in a series as you have done. It's a matter of custom, based on the belief that it is impolite to put one's self before other. "Mark and I" would go to Paris.

@CookieMonster Among native speakers you will almost never hear the construction as you have it. (I assume that you grasp the qualifier almost never.) It is a matter of custom, breeding, good manners, or the result of the imprecations of countless parents and English teachers. However, it is not grammatically incorrect to phrase it as you have done here. You may commonly hear the colloquial Me and Mark are going to Paris, but the first person subjective is very seldom used in such a construction.

@CookieMonster This is worth reading: Patterns of prestigious deviance. "Specifically, "me and someone" is about three times more common than "someone and me"; whereas "I and someone" is more than "slightly impolite" — it hardly ever occurs." -- BTW, not my downvote either.

The I preceding or succeeding the other person seems pretty subjective as per this discussion chain. I guess, it is better to place the I afterwards to avoid the wrath of the native speakers.

Subject-verb concord or agreement in English can sometimes get complicated, especially when you deal with pronouns. In such a short sentence as

My son and I are your fans

the verb are works not only because it obeys the rule of plural subject ('my son and I') and plural verb ('are') but also because it does not sound "off" or somehow "wrong."

However, in a longer sentence such as

My son, who by the way is 16 and is the father of five children, and I am among your greatest fans

the version with am may be judged by many native speakers to be "correct", especially in spoken English, chiefly because of the proximity or closeness of I with am, as compared to the much longer distance between the first subject ('my son') and the verb to be.

This is called the principle of proximity, which is a fancy way of saying that what sounds best is to match the verb to the closest subject, thus am in my sentence above.

the principle of proximity sometimes plays a part in subject-verb agreement. This principle is the tendency, especially in speech, for the verb to agree with the closest (pro)noun, even when that (pro)noun is not the head of the subject noun phrase.

However, to use are in my sentence would not be wrong and in fact would obey the rule of grammatical concord.