I've just posted a post with the words 'the majority of barristers are..' in it.Now this immediately seemed incorrect in print and I was about to change it to ' the majority is..' but the first sounds acceptable, it's what some educated people say, so I haven't bothered . This may be lax and idle of me but is there a prevailing rule on this point?
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05-19-03, 10:44 AM
juanruiz
As an addendum to this question, I've noticed that the Canadian news uses the plural verb form in such cases as "The Parliament are discussing... Chretien's cabinet are meeting"
05-19-03, 10:50 AM
Lydia
should the majority represent a specific number, it takes on the singular...

if it's referring to a group within that majority, it depends on whether the group is considered to be a "whole" or an "individual". Seems somewhat arbitrary perhaps.

05-19-03, 11:08 AM
maiku
Funny you should mention that, Fred. In a post of mine elsewhere at AP I recently wrote "an authority none of the rest of us have," and felt guilty about that for several days.

Horrors! That was decidely worse than your "the majority of barristers are...", which could at least claim the justification that Juan mentions above, that is, that collectives often do show plural agreement instead of singular (and particulary in the U.K. and Canada, less often here in the U.S.)

More generally, in partitive genetive constructions like yours, there is a strong tendency for speakers of English of all kinds, even very well educated ones, to make the verb agree with the plural noun after the of instead of with the singular head noun (which, to the purist, is still the only correct thing to do). This has the look to me of a syntactic change in English in the making, or maybe even already made.

05-19-03, 01:08 PM
newnickname
TOEIC, the Test of English for International Communication, has a couple of sections on grammar and vocabulary. One of the ways in which examiners like to catch candidates out in these sections is with constructions such as 'The committee have...' and 'The board of directors are...'.

According to TOEIC, those verb forms are wrong. Are my poor old ESL students therefore learning English that is more 'correct' than that of native speakers, or is TOEIC behind the times?

My class (of students) is/are complaining again.

05-19-03, 01:35 PM
maiku
You've given three different cases above, nnn, and they're all different!

"The committee have" would not be used in the U.S., but I'm surprised to hear some group of Canadian authorities has condemned it, for that runs counter to Juan Ruiz' examples involving "parliament" and "cabinet," in which collective nouns are made to agree with a plural verb. This is nothing novel in English, and has been going on in Britain and in Canada for a long, long time. So I'd say your TOEIC was/were quite seriously behind the times on that one.

I agree with them, though, about "the board of directors are." That is just flat bad usage, to my ear. Note that it is not at all a case of the partitive genetive I talked about above in connection with constructions like "the majority of people are" or "none of us were," and so on. It is no more partitive genetive than related constructions such as "the board of trade" or "the house of cards."

Your last example (though maybe you didn't mean it as an example) is not a partitive genetive, either. I'm not sure exactly what to call it. It sounds like a "mixed construction" to me, and I'd say offhand that it would be better to write "My students are..." or "My class is...", thus not raising the question in the first place.

05-19-03, 03:54 PM
juanruiz
In regard to my specific examples, there may be a difference between CBC norms and how Canadians themselves may speak. Invariably the CBC has plural verb forms, yet when I listen on the web to such call-in programs as Cross Country Checkup, I hear singular forms used. I don't know, nnn, you live there. What do you say?

05-19-03, 05:15 PM
newnickname
I think people here say things like, "The Korean soccer team are..." but, in their heart of hearts, they know they should be saying, "The Korean soccer team is...".
TOEIC, by the way, is not Canadian, but an internationally recognised test.

05-19-03, 05:35 PM
FredPuli
The rule seems to be that , in the UK at least, the form of the verb is decided by the speaker according to how he thinks of the subject.
'At last!The jury is agreed upon its verdict. Up to the last minute they could not agree about anything! My opinion of that jury? They wasted a lot of time'( said the majority of barristers!). There is nothing wrong with 'they' for a jury but we take the verdict of 'it'.Then 'The jury looks stupid '. 'Yes I agree. The jury do look stupid , don't they ?'.Perhaps the second speaker is more discerning, less given to taking all as the same, than the first. The same applies to 'committee' and 'team' and other such words.
Sports reporters here say 'England play on Thursday' and 'England plays...' quite interchangeably from moment to moment.Yet 'the midfield is playing well; they are passing so incisively' could be heard or seen, if not in the same sentence then in the same paragraph and seems right as the reporter stops thinking of the unit as a unit but of the players of the unit performing; three players do not make one pass together but each one's pass is for the unit of three, the midfield, in their common design.So we do say 'committee has' and 'committee have' here depending on those thoughts. Is it 'the board of directors is arguing amongst itself? It's 'the board of directors are arguing amongst themselves', isn't it?'Amongst ...'adds nothing, but I put it in to show how a speaker might be thinking, whether he says it or not, in deciding the matter.
'The majority of barristers' means exactly the same as 'the majority of the Bar' in England . However, for me, the first 'live in the South' and the second 'is against reform'.The first 'live' in houses all over Southern England but the second thinks and is as one on this issue concerning the profession.So , as it happens, my 'majority' 'are' not 'is' practising...

[This message was edited by FredPuli on 05-19-03 at 05:45 PM.]

[This message was edited by FredPuli on 05-19-03 at 05:52 PM.]

05-19-03, 06:32 PM
maiku
What you say about "the majority of the barristers" as opposed to "the majority of the bar" is exact confirmation of what I said about partitive genetive constructions in English, Fred.

Most of your examples of collective nouns, on the other hand, are treated differently here in the U.S. We would never say "The United States are playing Mexico on Friday" or "The Packer's offensive line are controlling scrimmage." It's "is" in both cases for us. Always, and under all ways the U.S. team members or the Packer line might be being considered by the speaker privately.

The use of the plural pronoun "they" to refer to a grammatically singular but notionally plural antecedent, as in "Everyone has their own opinion" is another matter entirely. It is still condemned by purists over here, but it is practically universal, and most Americans would far rather say that than "Everyone has his own opinion" (sexist?) or worse "Everyone has his or her own opinion" (wordy). The jury reaches a verdict here, much as yours do, I'm sure, but when they disagree with each other, then we do not normally say "The jury is at odds with each other" but rather "The jurors are at odds with each other."

Nobody here would ever say "The board of directors are arguing among(st) themselves." Well, I take that back. Some people might. You never can tell. But we wouldn't say "The board of directors is arguing among(st) itself," either. I myself would have to resort to "The members of the board of directors are..." or, better, maybe, "The directors on the board are..."

05-19-03, 08:56 PM
Tree
In my books, it's "The Board
of Directors IS".

The "Committee IS". It makes
sense to me.

I don't understand how you
can say: "The way Canadians
speak...", Juan. As in the US
and in Spain, we ALL don't
speak the very same language!
It tends to vary from city to
city, region to region AND
person to person.

Not everyone is a professor,
nor is everyone a moron.

You know what they say, " A
fool may think he's a wise man,
but only a wise man KNOWS that
he is a fool"

Language changes over the years,
so, there is really not one hard
and fast rule here. Common sense
will prevail.

05-20-03, 05:04 AM
FredPuli
Here, Maiku, I've always thought that we used 'they'and 'their' to avoid the clumsy 'he or she' and 'his or hers' which would otherwise be required.Sexism is not a consideration for the typical speaker 'whether they be sexist or not (!)'The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary gives this 'They ...4) In relation to a singular noun or pronoun of undeterminate gender; he or she (considered erroneous by some)'.That is a very mild caveat in a dictionary which has 'colloquial/ly''irregular/ly, 'euphemistically' and all the rest of its italicised comments, including the unqualified 'erroneously' to explain such matters. It suggests that by 1944, when this edition was first published, the use of 'they' in this way was accepted as correct standard English by most people. The caveat is for those of us who write for or to journals where there may yet be ancient English readers who take exception to it ( or I suppose, purist Americans, in the light of what you say !)To be fair, the comment was not excised in the 1993 revision. I don't know if it has survived in the new edition (just out).

[This message was edited by FredPuli on 05-20-03 at 05:14 AM.]

05-20-03, 06:04 AM
FredPuli
I'm not sure that I used my 'Bar' illustration well or clearly, Maiku. I would say 'the majority of the Bar are arguing about it'. I say 'the majority of the Bar is against reform'I was not thinking that because 'the Bar' was singular and 'barristers' plural one was followed by 'is' and the other by 'are' whether that be seen as a rule or just practice.I chose the example because it struck me as an instance where, because of the context 'is' would be chosen without hesitation, not that it would always be so.This is a marked example of the 'midfield' kind. I think of the Bar as meeting formally to decide on the issue and the majority being for the motion, as it were ( as it happens fiction is close to fact ,here!).When the majority are arguing, though, they are lots of individuals arguing who are categorised as 'the majority'.
It is only belatedly that it dawned on me that this is what is happening when British speakers, as they do, sometimes switch from singular to plural in the same speech when using the very same word e.g. midfield. (I have been watching and later reading about our Football Association Cup Final). It may well be that simple agreement, such as you mention, between the plural second word and the adjacent verb applies too but the UK usage seems to have a second explanation.

05-20-03, 07:58 AM
juanruiz
Tree,

I'm not sure where the misunderstanding is coming from. I believe I specified I was talking about the norm used by the CBC (listen to the National or Canada Now for examples).
I then asked nnn what he did. I don't believe I generalized about all Canadians, eh?

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