there's versus there're

[curiousone]

Is the rule of using there's(there is) versus there're (there are) pretty loose in speaking American English? Because I often hear someone using 'there's' follow by some plural nouns. So whenever I hear that, I don't know if they are actually wrong and am I wrong? This question has been bugging me for a long time, so if anyone can help that'd be great.

For example, I was listening to this radio show and the DJ said "there's four questions left..."

you can find the audio clip that I've clipped out from the show here: zSHARE - sample.mp3 (http://www.zshare.net/audio/56868171df0f5630/)

or if you don't want to download that for whatever reasons, here's the direct link to the radio show and the part starts at 28:17
http://icestream.bonnint.net/seattle...009310_8pm.mp3 (http://icestream.bonnint.net/seattle/kiro/2009/03/p_TBTL_with_Luke_Burbank_2009310_8pm.mp3)

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[Marius Hancu]

"there's four questions left..."

Yes, informal and not quite correct, however very frequent.

[OddThomas]

Marius is right. In conversation, it rolls off the tongue easily--too easily to catch in time. It's a bit sloppy.

[curiousone]

Thanks for clearing that up guys!

[MrPedantic]

It's common in BrE too; it presents the items as a single entity:

1. There's [a group of] four questions left.

I'm not sure it's as common where the items are less easy to batch, e.g.

2. There's 97 tanks on the lawn.

MrP

[OddThomas]

It's a bit late to think about grammar when that happens. :eek:

[Pete]

When you are uttering most English sentences, you put the subject first, so by the time you get to the verb, you know what it has to agree with. In cases like sentences beginning with the expletive there or some questions, the verb comes first, so you need to plan ahead and know exactly what the subject will be before you start speaking. It's not that we're not supposed to do it right, but it is certainly easy to make a mistake and start with one verb form and then realize that the subject you want to use doesn't match.

In spoken English, people will notice the error but probably won't take it too seriously. In written English, we would expect that even if the writer got it wrong at first, it should be correct by the time we see it in print.

Note that this is different from the more basic (and harder) question of whether a given subject should be treated as singular or plural. This issue is independent of the position of the subject relative to the verb.