Re: Epicene pronoun in english?

Tom W:
> Yes, it's not surprising cross-lingustically that there
> might be a number-mismatch for nouns low in animacy;  this
> is quite common.  However, in Greek this was a regular rule,
> but in no English dialect is it regular.  The peculiar fact
> is that "The United States is" contradicts the pattern of
> *both* dialects.  The morphological plural would predict
> "are" for American dialects (and indeed this *was* the agreement
> used before the late 19th century), and the semantic collective
> would predict "are" as well for Brits (assuming those are
> the right generalizations for the respect dialects).
The English English rule is that singular subjects occur
with singular or plural verbs depending on whether the subject
is construed as a group of separate individuals. The jury
is still out on whether verb agreement with plural subjects
is also purely semantic or whether it is syntactic (-- I
vote syntactic, personally). Complicating this particular
example is the question of whether "The United States" is
grammatically plural or (like, say, 'linguistics' and
'politics') singular, though it looks pretty singular
to me. In English English "the United States have gone
to war" does not mean that individual states have gone to
war; it means that the USA as a many-membered collective
has gone to war. Of course in your Aus textbook example,
it is the states that are tearing themselves apart, but
that is not unusual grammar; it's an unusual construal
of the name, taking it literally, under the contextual
influence of the civil war.

--And.