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Re: Epicene pronoun in english?

From:Tristan McLeay <kesuari@...>
Date:Monday, March 8, 2004, 11:03
 --- Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...> wrote: >
"Thomas R. Wier" wrote:
> > No, we use "is" all the time -- though, as with > y'all, it's normally > > a clitic. The problem is that number agreement is > just not very well > > understood in the English speaking world. It's > not that Americans use > > morphological number and Brits use semantic > number: we both say "the > > United States *is*", afterall. > > Is it usual to use plural with The United States in > Australia? The > reason I ask is that a book on Japanese history, > written in Australia, > had the phrase "... in the 1860s as the United > States tore themselves > apart in their Civil War" (the only number-relavent > reference to the > United States in the book)
Something of this kind is too based around formal grammar to really have its own rules about it in Oz. I would probably treat the United States as any other obvious group* and if it was doing something like being torn apart, I'd use a plural, but if it's doing something like having a war with Iraq, I'd use the singular. Especially when discussing America in the past. In the present, for some reason, I might be less likely... (Perhaps because it feels old fashioned and so seems more appropriate.) * An often-cited diff. b/n BrE and AmE uses things like 'the family were arguing amongst themselves'; I wouldn't do that. Company names can (but aren't compelled to) take singular verbs but plural pronouns if you feel like it though: Yahoo! has an interesting history. They were blah... (Which is just something I've randomly made up and I'm not quoting from anywhere.) This is how I tend to talk, and I've heard it from others, too. (Particular verbs or groups seem to take plural verbs more frequently than others, though; 'Telstra suck' is an example of a company that takes plural verbs and a verb that comes in the plural when with a company more ferquently than others...) (OTOH, 'there', 'where', and to some extent 'here' can unobjectionably take singular verbs, some odd conservatives notwithstanding. My ear/eye certainly has difficulty picking out 'incorrectnesses' of this sort.) If I made an ounce of sense. -- Tristan. -- Find local movie times and trailers on Yahoo! Movies. http://au.movies.yahoo.com