What amounts to be a Google mystery.
I had the Environment Report playing in the background at work, when the following sentence caught my attention: "More than seventeen million gallons of grape juice is sitting in what amounts to be a huge refrigerator." (It's right at the beginning of their report on Welch's using waste juice to produce electricity.) It was the word "be" in "what amounts to be" that caught my ear. I don't think I would put a "be" there, but I couldn't decide if it sounded wrong to me or just an odd word choice, so I checked Google.
First I searched {"what amounts to be"}, which turned up 763,000 hits (actually, these numbers change slightly each time I do the search). Some of those results look wrong to me, but others seem acceptable, so I tried again without the "be." A search on {"what amounts to"} gave 1,260,000 hits. That ought to include all the instances of "what amounts to be" plus all the instances of "what amounts to" without "be," so I expected over half of them to include the "be." But the first ten pages contain only one example of "what amounts to be" (and, even more oddly, several of the first hits don't even have the word "amount").
Just for fun, I tried {"what amounts to" -"what amounts to be"}, and that only returned 158,000 hits, so I still don't know whether the version with or without "be" is more common.
For what it's worth, I still think the example from the Environment Report sounds wrong, and I figured out later that I think it sounds almost right because it mimics the phrase "appears to be."
First I searched {"what amounts to be"}, which turned up 763,000 hits (actually, these numbers change slightly each time I do the search). Some of those results look wrong to me, but others seem acceptable, so I tried again without the "be." A search on {"what amounts to"} gave 1,260,000 hits. That ought to include all the instances of "what amounts to be" plus all the instances of "what amounts to" without "be," so I expected over half of them to include the "be." But the first ten pages contain only one example of "what amounts to be" (and, even more oddly, several of the first hits don't even have the word "amount").
Just for fun, I tried {"what amounts to" -"what amounts to be"}, and that only returned 158,000 hits, so I still don't know whether the version with or without "be" is more common.
For what it's worth, I still think the example from the Environment Report sounds wrong, and I figured out later that I think it sounds almost right because it mimics the phrase "appears to be."