Re: Epicene pronoun in english?

"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)

The book was originally written in 1973, with a revision in 1997.

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