There's with a plural

There is a common use of the general-purpose question tag isn’t it? which always attracts the wrath of English language teachers.  Instead of adjusting the tag to suit the subject of the sentence, speakers of Asian Englishes are happy to pop in isn’t it? at the end of any sentence.

 So what should happen is as follows:

I am going to be very happy, aren’t I?

You are going to be there, aren’t you?

They will be there, won’t they?

 But in Indian English this could be:

I am going to be very happy, isn’t it?

You are going home, isn’t it?

They will be there, isn’t it?

This sounds very odd to speakers of Australian English but there are tags that we are happy to use in much the same way.  It seems that there’s is on the way to becoming a fused unit at the beginning of a sentence allowing both singular and plural to follow.

 It should be:

There’s (there is) one person sitting there.

There’re (there are) two people sitting there.

 But quite often it becomes:

There’s two people sitting there.

 It is interesting the language bits and pieces that we continue to analyse into their parts and the ones that become fused.  The phrase a lot is on the way to becoming alot just as already and anywhere have done in the past.

 In speech there’s is just a way of getting your sentence started and you are thinking more about what follows there’s so having a fixed unit as a kick-off allows you to spend more thinking time on what follows.  We all know this so we tend to say that there’s in speech is idiomatic whereas in written texts we would probably ‘correct’ it.