@coriander “the gardener are planting which flowers”

@coriander i am like… i see your point, but “which flowers is” is just wrong

@Lady @coriander I am so angry that you are right

@Lady Honestly I would just not use this construction if I was asking this question in the first place

@coriander@elekk.xyz @Lady@glitch.cat.family gardener is singular, not plural... but flowers are plural.

edge case!

@coriander @Lady gardener is the subject, not flowers. "Which flowers are being planted by the gardener" "what is the gardener planting"

@funkula @coriander @Lady yeah I guess this could be it, if you're taking an english class in 1959

@anime_reference @coriander @Lady no I think it still sounds better with is today, I was just articulating why

@coriander @Lady the only thing I can come up with is "they're trying to gotcha you because there's no question mark"

@coriander @Lady the gardener is the subject and the flowers are the object - a proper grammatical construction might be "Which flowers are being planted by the gardener?" because it shifts the subject to the flowers (to be planted). or you could have "Which flowers are the gardeners planting?" but in the example given, there is only one gardener is doing the planting. in this case, it would be more grammatical to say "Which flowers is the gardener planting?" but this feels clunky for reasons I'm not sure of

@virtue @coriander “feels clunky for reasons i’m not sure of” is a good summary of the linguistic definition of “ungrammatical”

@Lady @coriander certainly so - I'm saying that it's approaching being grammatical but still isn't, I just don't have the specific grammar rule to point to that explains why