[讨论]what引导主语从句的主谓一致 - ChaseDream

The period when the great painted caves at Lascaux and Altamira were occupied by Upper Paleolithic people has been established by carbon-14 dating, but what is much more difficult to determine are the reason for their decoration, the use to which primitive people put the caves, and the meaning of the magnificently depicted animal.

A has been established by carbon-14 dating, but what is much more difficult to determine are

B has been established by carbon-14 dating, but what is much more difficult to determine is

白勇说B对,因为what在从句中做主语,所以determine后用is,A中的are错

2）what充当宾语时，主句谓语动词由主句谓语动词后的名词决定

From studies of the bony house of the brain, which is the cranium, located in the back of the skull, come what scientists know about dinosaur brains.

(A) From studies of the bony house of the brain, which is the cranium, located in the back of the skull, come what scientists know about dinosaur brains.

(B) The knowledge that scientists know about dinosaur brains comes from studies of the bony house of the brain, located in the back of the skull, that is, the cranium.

(C) The knowledge of dinosaur brains that scientists have come from studies of the bony house of the brain, which is located in the back of the skull and is called the cranium.

(D) What scientists know about dinosaur brains comes from studies of the cranium, the bony house of the brain located in the back of the skull.(D)

(E) Located in the back of the skull is the cranium, the bony house of the brain, and it is from studies of this that scientists know what they know about dinosaur brains.

按照白勇的规则：what在从句充当宾语时，主句谓语动词由主句谓语动词后的名词决定

但是，主句谓语动词comes（应该是comes吧？）和后面的名词 studies of the cranium数不一样啊！？

prep 解释给出的规则是：what引导的名词从句作主语，谓语动词用单数形式

关于 what从句谓语的数的情况大家都会了吗？怎么没人讨论？

以下是引用AlienX在2008-10-30 13:07:00的发言：
um...我把所有出現在OG/Prep/GWD/大全(沒有所有的句子=(, 如果誰有所有大全的correct的句子, 請發一下=D)有用what的看了一下:

something singular
- place
prep2:16.
The single-family house constructed by the Yana, a Native American
people who lived in what is now northern California, was conical in
shape, its framework of poles overlaid with slabs of bark, either cedar
or pine, and banked with dirt to a height of three to four feet.
prep2:61.
Researchers in Germany have unearthed 400,000-year-old wooden spears
from what appears to be an ancient lakeshore hunting ground, stunning
evidence that human ancestors systematically hunted big game much
earlier than believed.
GWDn1000:64.The first trenches cut into a
500-arce site at Tell Hamoukar, Syria, have yielded strong evidence
that centrally administered complex societies in northern regions of
the Middle East arose simultaneously with but independently of the more
celebrated city-states of southern Mesopotamia, in what is now southern
Iraq.
- knowledge
prep2:6.      What scientists know about
dinosaur brains comes from studies of the cranium, the bony house of
the brain located in the back of the skull.
- other
GWDn1000:104.While
digging in the Egyptian desert, paleontologists have found huge fossil
bones from what appears to be the second most massive dinosaur that
ever lived.
prep2:101.    The electronics company has unveiled what
it claims is the world's smallest network digital camcorder, which is
as long as a handheld computer and weighs less than 11 ounces.
OG10:88.
The Emperor Augustus, it appears, commissioned an idealized sculpture
portrait, the features of which are so unrealistic as to constitute
what one scholar calls an "artificial face."
OG10:210. Scientists
have recently discovered what could be the largest and oldest living
organism on Earth, a giant fungus that is an interwoven filigree of
mushrooms and rootlike tentacles spawned by a single fertilized spore
some 10,000 years ago and extending for more than 30 acres in the soil
of a Michigan forest.
OG10:240. What brought the automobile company
back from the verge of bankruptcy shortly after the Second World War
was a special, governmentally sanctioned price increase allowed during
a period of wage and price controls.
OG10:211. The period when the
great painted caves at Lascaux and Altamira were occupied by Upper
Paleolithic people has been established by carbon-14 dating, but what
is much more difficult to determine is the reason for their decoration,
the use to which primitive people put the caves, and the meaning of the
magnificently depicted animals.
OG10:258. The British sociologist
and activist Barbara Wootton once noted as a humorous example of income
maldistribution that the elephant that gave rides to children at the
Whipsnade Zoo was earning annually exactly what she then earned as
director of adult education for London.
GWDn1000:153.At the time of
the Mexican agrarian revolution, the most radical faction, that of
Zapata and his followers, proposed a return to communal ownership of
land, to what had been a pre-Columbian form of ownership respected by
the Spaniards.
GWDn1000:238.Dental caries and gingivitis can be exacerbated not only by what patients eat but also by when they eat it.
GWDn1000:151.Spanish
poet Juan Ramon Jimenez, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1956, was so embarrassed in his later years by what he considered the
excessive sentiment in the poems in his first two collections that he
destroyed every copy he could find.

something plural
- place
OG11:59.
His studies of ice-polished rocks in his Alpine homeland, far outside
the range of present-day glaciers, led Louis Agassiz in 1837 to propose
the concept of an age in which great ice sheets existed in what are now
temperate areas.
- other
OG11:7.       Carnivorous mammals can
endure what would otherwise be lethal levels of body heat because they
have a heat-exchange network that keeps the brain from getting too hot.
GWDn1000:35.Even
though more money was removed out of stock funds in July than in any
other month since October 1987, sales of fund shares in July were not
as low as what an industry trade group had previously estimated.

speical
prep2:47.
Those skeptical of the extent of global warming argue that short-term
temperature data are an inadequate means of predicting long-term trends
and point out that the scientific community remains divided over
whether significant warming will occur and what impact it would have.
OG10:53.
There is no consensus on what role, if any, is played by acid rain in
damaging or slowing the growth of forests in the eastern United States.
OG10:73.
The British Admiralty and the War Office met in March 1892 to consider
a possible Russian attempt to seize Constantinople and what military
action would be necessary in order to deal with such an event.
GWDn1000:41.A
leading figure in the Scottish enlightenment, Adam Smith wrote two
major books that are to democratic capitalism what Marx’s Das Kapital
is to socialism.

基本上好像沒有一個mechanism去decide單複數
要看what到底是要表示一個單數還是複數去決定謂語的單複

3rd floor的question(其實是OG10#211)比較容易決定:
What is....is...
What are...are...
因為what是what從句的主語也是主句的主語, 所以從句跟主句的單複一定會一致

6th floor的question比較難決定:
what是know about的object, 同時是主句的subject.
只看結構不看意思, what可單可複
看意思的話, what是指**一個**knowledge, 那個knowledge就是the bony house of the brain located in the back of the skull, 不多不少, 就一個knowledge

conclusion: what的單複要看句意....

恩...what从句作主语，what在从句里作宾语的情况，确实要看逻辑意思了...

prep2-6那个题如果没有任何背景因素就那么一个句子，我想我们无法判断主句谓语动词用单数还是复数的...