Re: USAGE: number concord in AmE, again

And Rosta scripsit:

> Since several people insisted to me in a recent discussion
> on this list that in AmE verb agreement is determined
> purely by syntactic number, I was struck by the following,
> said by the senator from Nevada near the start of The
> Godfather part II: "the Sierra Boys' Choir, who have
> chosen a special song". Is this because animacy overrides
> number concord, so that "who have" is preferable to
> "which has"?
Well, "which have" and "who has" would have been impossible:
the first is ungrammatical and the second would make the choir itself
animate.  So what we have here is a mild anacoluthon and
synecdoche (reverse synecdoche? I forget) involving using
"choir" for "members of the choir".

--
John Cowan <jcowan@...>     http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_

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