(Untitled)

[kalmialatifolia]

Poll

Comments

[psychobookworm]

Gah! There's = There is is making me want to kill this question.

But if I heard it spoken, the first one is less weird.

[spookee_eyez]

I mean, both are kind of ouchie, and I've probably been caught saying both, but I choose the latter

[nietzscheansmut]

Likewise. I'm not entirely sure why...it might have to do with the preposition? Somehow "there's lots of cups in" sounds less bad to me than "there's lots of cups on."

[kalmialatifolia]

I have a theory that has to do with "degrees" of plurality (if you will). I'm not sure there's any difference between the two for me but I would really like it if (a) was worse. There are fewer cups in sentence a that have a closer relationship to each other.

I'm trying to do a study on this but man, the lit search is proving difficult.

[eavanmoore]

This is coming reaaalllly late, but I wanted to chime in -- to me at first they sounded identically acceptable (but not comfortable because of the 's instead of 're), but once I realized that the first sentence had "on" instead of "in" it sounded worse, NOT because of any plurality differences BUT because "in" reduces better than "on", if you clearly articulate the "on" the deliberateness makes it that much stranger that it starts with "there's" and not "there're."

[papercrane]

i wouldn't even blink hearing either of them in spoken conversation (in written form i'd take a red pen to 'em), but i think the latter is something i would be just a bit more likely to hear.