Grammar and Sentence Structure: Agreement After 'Only One Of' and a Mixed Inversion Frame
Yuki is on the grammar section: ten items, eight minutes left.
Item 8 is error identification: 'Mika is the only one of the students who have been to Hokkaido.' She judges 'have' correct, because she was taught that a relative pronoun takes the number of the noun immediately before it, and 'students' is plural.
Item 9 is word ordering with one extra word: ( had / we / when / than / sat down / the lights went out ). She writes 'Hardly had we sat down than the lights went out', matching 'hardly' with 'than' because it feels like 'no sooner ... than', and she does not reread the full sentence.
Item 10 offers four forms for a reduced relative clause: 'The language ___ in this region is related to Finnish' - speaking / spoken / is spoken / to speak. She picks 'speaking' because 'the language speaks' sounds active to her. She has two minutes left for the rest of the section.
1. Correct item 8 and give a procedure that does not depend on memorising which noun 'who' refers to.
Read the worked answer
Correct version: 'Mika is the only one of the students who has been to Hokkaido.'
- The relative clause modifies whatever the writer is counting. With 'the only one of the students', the set is restricted to a single person - Mika - so the antecedent of who is 'the only one', singular, and the verb is has.
- Contrast: 'Mika is one of the students who have been to Hokkaido' = several students have been, and Mika belongs to that group. Dropping 'only' changes the meaning and therefore the agreement, which is why the two sentences take different verbs.
- Her 'nearest noun' rule works only by coincidence in the second pattern, where 'students' really is the antecedent. It fails as soon as a restrictor ('only', 'very', 'first', 'last') narrows the set to one member.
- Procedure: ask 'How many people have been to Hokkaido?' If the answer is one, use the singular verb; if it is several, use the plural. Then check the verb agrees with the number in that answer, not with the noun sitting next to who.
2. Give the correct sentence for item 9 and explain every decision that fixes it.
Read the worked answer
Answer: 'Hardly had we sat down when the lights went out.'
- Do not mix frames. hardly/scarcely ... when and no sooner ... than are two separate patterns. Her 'hardly ... than' pairs the adverb of one with the conjunction of the other, which English does not allow. The leftover word is 'than'.
- Inversion. A negative adverbial at the head of a clause moves the auxiliary in front of the subject: 'had we', not 'we had'. The same happens with never, rarely, not only, seldom.
- Tense. The sitting down happens first, so it takes the past perfect ('had sat down'); the interrupting event takes the past simple ('went out').
- Segment integrity. 'Sat down' is one segment and must stay together; splitting it produces a locally plausible but globally ungrammatical string.
- Check before moving on: read the finished sentence aloud as a whole. Her version breaks at the junction ('sat down than'), a fault visible only if the sentence is checked from end to end rather than word by word.
3. Correct item 10 and state a general method for four-option participle items.
Read the worked answer
Answer: spoken.
- Expand the reduced clause to see the voice: 'the language which is spoken in this region'. The language does not speak; it is spoken by people, so the passive participle is required. Reduced passive relative clauses keep the past participle: 'the cars made in Japan', 'the language spoken here'.
- 'Speaking' would be active and would make the language the speaker. 'Is spoken' creates a second finite verb with no conjunction ('The language is spoken in this region is related to Finnish'). 'To speak' would need a different frame and does not fit a reduced relative clause here.
- General method: rewrite the clause in full as which/that + be + participle, decide the voice from the meaning (does the noun act, or is it acted upon?), then delete the relative pronoun and be. What remains is the only correct form. This converts a four-way guess into two steps, and it works for 'the people injured', 'the window broken', 'the man standing'.