Automattic / Automattic/harper

Need to flag plural subject vs singular present tense verb agreement error

Open
#3,285 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
agreement enhancement good first issue grammar harper-core linting
Dominant language
Rust
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Forks
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Avg merge
1d 15h
Merged PRs (30d)
106

Description

Some real-world grammar problems from our Discord that Harper doesn't flag:

Image

> Web page**s** seem**s** to work pretty well so far.

"**pages seems**" should be either "**pages seem**" or "**page seems**"

Agreement is hard because there are so many factors and nouns, verbs, and other POSes can all be phrases as well as verbs.

But I'm starting to think that we could tackle agreement problems piecemeal as we encounter the most common ones, by using merged linters of small parts that handle one focused case each.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

No source file or test is identified in the issue. Start by reviewing Harper's existing merged linters and how they represent agreement checks, using the reported "pages seems" example as the initial case. Done means the checker flags the plural-subject/singular-verb mismatch while accepting "pages seem" and "page seems".

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
devtools
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
38/100

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