Job Discussion Forums

[Kent F. Kruhoeffer]

Hi there!

I usually don't have many questions related to grammar, but this one has me a little stumped.

a) He is one of the students, who was praised.

b) He is one of the students, who were praised.

My gut instinct is to go with choice 'a' since he/one ... was.

However, one of my students has an English teacher who told him that choice 'b' is the correct answer. i.e., Does the relative pronoun 'who' change the subject from 'he' to 'students'? If so, answer 'b' would or could indeed be correct.

Cut to the chase: Are both 'a' and 'b' correct, i.e., open to interpretation, or is there only one correct answer, from a strict grammatical perspective?

I appreciate your input!

[Shroob]

[Kent F. Kruhoeffer]

Hello Shroob:

Thanks for jumping in there!

Yeah, this one looked like it could go both ways but I assumed there was a grammar rule of some kind, that would make one choice better than the other.

Thanks again for your reply.

[Sashadroogie]

Depends who was praised, maybe. Just that one guy, or the whole group of students...

[Sashadroogie]

Hard to tell with the comma. And the vodka breakfast...

[Kent F. Kruhoeffer]

привет Sasha !

Good point. This was apparently a test question, and without any additional context, it's hard to say, although my take on the sentence, as is, is that more than one student was praised, which would support Shroob's opinion that 'were' is correct.

[Kent F. Kruhoeffer]

By the way, Ваше здоровье!

[Sashadroogie]

'He is one of the students who was praised' would be correct, though, wouldn't it? No comma, and sounds more natural to me, at least. The 'students' would be the object of the preposition, and not function as the subject verb 'was praised'. A little like 'he is one who was praised'.

Need more vodka to get this straight in my mind though... hic hic!