Edith:

I'll offer my explanations below:

> Here is the first: If I had learned English in my native country, I wouldn't have these many problems."  "Problems" certainly seems to be the noun here, but we would all say "this many problems," not "these many problems." We would say "these problems." Is this an example of postpositioning that was discussed last week? I can imagine saying "These many problems are bothering me." But in speaking there would be an emphasis on many and a pause between these and many not used normally.
>

To me, both "these many problems" and "this many problems" sound fine.
There's a hidden issue here that needs to be unpacked: "these many
problems" is structurally/semantically ambiguous, similar to the way
"red rat eater" is. There are two nearly synonymous possibilities for
the meaning of "these many problems":

1. "These" could modify "many", with "these many" acting as a
determiner for "problems"
2. "Many" could be the determiner to "problems", with "These" being
the determiner for "many problems".

If you grant that I am write about the structural ambiguity, then it
should be grammatical to replace "this" for "these" in the first
reading, since "this many" is grammatically OK in many other contexts:

3. Q: How many problems were there?
    A: THIS many.

In this case, "this" doesn't need to agree in number with "problems",
since it is not truly the determiner for that noun.


Hope this is clear.


> And here is the second: "In recent weeks, a string of teenagers have killed themselves after being tormented by classmates........ " We would usually say that string is the subject and requires a singular verb. However, that clearly would be very strange here and we certainly wouldn't have the string killing itself. Is it the reflexive here that requires the plural verb?
>

For this sentence, I would refer you to ch.4 of Brock Haussamen's book
"Revising the Rules". This chapter deals with the complexities of
subject-verb number agreement. Haussamen argues that there are two
types of number: the number of the subject and the number of the verb.
In the prototypical cases, the two coincide, and all goes as usual.
But in the case of noun phrases where the head noun is grammatically
singular but where the whole phrase refers to a collective (string of
teenagers), you might consider the subject to be *semantically*
plural. In these cases, the verb is construed as semantically plural
and thus caries the plural morphology. Basically, there is a tension
between semantic notions of plurality and grammatical notions of
plurality, with the semantic notion sometimes determining the
morphology of the verb. If you have further questions, see that book,
because he explains it in more depth.


Hope this clarifies,
--Dan Roth
University of San Francisco

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