Re: USAGE: number concord in AmE, again
| From: | Andrew Smith <andrew.smith20@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, June 21, 2002, 8:41 |
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On Thu, 20 Jun 2002 22:44:53 +0100, And Rosta <a-rosta@...> wrote:
>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"?
>
>--And.
As an aside to this, even though we came to the conclusion that agreement
was syntactic in the US and semantic in Britain, I heard a Scottish woman on
the radio this morning saying:
"If England wins today, it will provide a great boost to the economy".
Presumably the economy will now unfortunately remain boostless.
Andrew
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