Re: Epicene pronoun in english?

 --- 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.
--

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