I recently had an email from a reader writing for his fantasy story website that raised an interesting point; the writer had a statement saying someone needed to check “how many guards are there” and was told that “how many guards there are” was the correct form. The writer thought both were correct, so asked what the difference was. It is true, from a neutral perspective both “how many there are” or “how many are there” can be correct, but they have different uses. Here’s why:
Question Inversion for Stative Sentences
In this context to check “how many guards there are” is the correct form because it is a stative sentence. As a question, it would be inverted: “How many guards are there?” As indirect speech, however, questions are not inverted: “Please check how many guards there are.” This means (in simplified form!) that the verb comes after the subject in a reported question.
This would the same for other reported questions (stative or otherwise):
- “What is the time?” / He asked what the time was.
- “Where did the car go?” She asked where the car went.
“There are” vs “Are There”
When we use “There is/are” to form a statement, “there” indicates the state (there or not, a bit like to be or not). In this use, it functions like a subject. So we have “How many are there?” but “He asked how many there are.”
However, “there” can also be used to indicate a location. It fits into a question in the same position (“How many are there?”) but does not behave as a subject when we report speech – it behaves, instead, as a location. So the way we invert this question becomes a consideration of what information is being asked for. This may only become clear in the right context.
- “You can see the guards. How many guards are there?” (In existence.)
- “Some of the guards have moved to the gate. How many guards are there?” (In that location.)
They look the same here, in question form, because the stative question is inverted. In reported speech, however, it is not inverted, while the location question’s word order does not change.
- “I can see some guards – I’ll check how many there are.”
- “Some of the guards have moved to the gate. I’ll check to see how many are there.”
And so, from one question form we can actually have two different reported speech forms that are both correct – in the right context!
This is a difficult and very specific point, so please let me know below if the explanation isn’t clear – or you have any questions!
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Thanks for your explanation!
The point raised by the reader is really interesting. Though English is not my native language so far I believed that I have comprehended the intricacies of its uses in different contexts. I must admit that but for your lucid explanations and examples my understanding of its usages remained vague. I am confident that I will now be able to explain the whole gamut of its related usages in detail. Thanks for the presentation.
You’re welcome, I’m glad it helps!
I’m coming to this rather late, after I received one of your emails on the 24th of June 2021. It’s an intriguing variation on sentence structure – thanks for the explanation. It had never occurred to me to analyse it for, like so much of one’s mother-tongue, “it just comes naturally”. Yet, trying to work it out in other languages, and trying to identify quite which rules are at play, certainly gets the grey cells working! Like so much of linguistic alchemy, I understand the rules but trying to explain them to others is very hard. Thanks for all that you do in that regard.
Yes, it is a constant challenge! With questions like this, it’s something native speakers are only led to consider when someone from a different perspective raises the question. In general, foreign learners are often better equipped to unravel language mysteries, coming at it from a technical angle.
Shouldn’t it be “He asked what the time was”?
Hi Bak, yes you’re right thanks for pointing that out, I’ll correct it.
is it correct to say: Do we know how many cars there are?
Hi Hamada, yes that is grammatical.