Job Discussion Forums

[AsiaTraveller]

poro,

I enjoy collecting manuals of English usage, both American and British. They document the rich variety of 'acceptable' uses of words throughout much of the past few centuries (and even further back).

Many 'rules' that we teach in our classes can be found to have been 'broken' by even the most estimable of English writers past and present. The changes -- and even cyclic changes -- in the usage of common words and expressions are a source of never-ending fascination for me.

[poro]

[Stephen Jones]

Dear AT

I'm talking about whether the FBI is always considered singular in American English. The use of 'thirr' for singular antecedents is not mentioned.

Where 'FBI' means 'FBI agents' then it will take a plural. Your claim that an American would always use 'members' or 'agents' in this sense is not backed up by the corpus.

You appear to be correct in saying that when we are not using 'FBI' as shorthand for 'FBI agents', then Americans will normally use a singular verb. This is not 100% true however. The discussion in the link below has at least two examples of the FBI being treated as plural.
http://www.cnn.com/US/9603/montana_freemen/30/am/feedback.html

You are too draconian with regard to the singular forms being admitted or used in British English.
I hope Chelsea wins the cup is correct and used, though the plural is probably more common.

We are dealing with tendencies here rather than absolute rules. And I would certainly not accept American style books as an authority for what is actually used in Standard American English. They suffer from the belief tha the author can impose his own views on the rest of us - which as regards the style of the publiication he is in charge of is true - but also suffer from the delusion that the particular set of rules imposed actually are valid for American English, or Engilish in general. That doesn't mean they are not a useful aid to writing elegantly.

Dear poro

English is much less chaotic than you imagine. With regard to subject verb agreement in English there are three factors to be taken into account:

Grammatical or formal agreement - that is the number of the formal subject
Notional agreement - that is the number which the subject is considered to have semantically, independent of the number it has fomally.
"Spurious Agreement" - where the verb is affected by the number of the adjoining words, independent of whether they are the formal or notional subject.

Obvioulsy whichever of these is considered to be the most important will decide the number of the verb, and different speakers in different areas at different times will come to different conclusions, but the factors involved are not unduly complicated.

[AsiaTraveller]

[Stephen Jones]

Actually, you have raised an important point about copy editors influencing what appears.

There can be little doubt that they cause constructions they frown upon to appear much less often than they would do naturally.

I'm not disagreeing with you about the fact that the singular verb is more common in the US and the plural in the UK. What I am saying is that it is not a hard-and-fast rule.

[AsiaTraveller]

Stephen,

Unfortunately, it's "hard and fast" with some of the people I'm currently training! I prepare them to teach in certain international schools where the secondary school English syllabus worships the grammar handbooks and the SAT writing exams.

I'm also training some writers and editors in the software documentation field, in which American style manuals rule the day (notably the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications and the Chicago Manual of Style).

And I've had some experience with the dreaded Indian call centres, where Hindi speakers, Bengali speakers, Tamil speakers and many others are now being forced to learn American usage if they work for American companies. The "collective noun" issue is definitely covered in their training.

It would be good if all English learners could be encouraged to write in as free a manner as do the contributors to the Internet bulletin board you cited. But our learners are often constrained by the needs of their tests, future coursework and jobs.

[Kurochan]

[AsiaTraveller]

Well, most newspapers use the AP Stylebook. And it does have a short entry on "collective nouns," in which it lists the following as (presumably always) singular:

class, committee, crowd, family, group, herd, jury, orchestra, and team

However, I don't recall that the APA and MLA style guidelines provide anything specific about collective nouns (Chicago offers only the gentlest of hints). Maybe you're thinking about different styles of punctuation use, capitalization, numbering, and citations, among other topics? Yes, those do indeed lead to endless confusion among authors and editors!

[santo]

[carnac]

[quote="AsiaTraveller"]

[Stephen Jones]

[AsiaTraveller]

And we're all talking about varied types of teaching/learning situations in which 'goal' and 'purpose' should be understood.

My goals for the different people I teach and train are highly varied. If a prescriptivist approach is appropriate, that's what I'll use. But I always tell the learners what I'm doing, what they're about to learn, and why they're learning it.

Because I've placed their current learning in context, they're aware of the constant need for additional learning about English.

[poro]

[Stephen Jones]

[poro]

I don't know Chinese, Stephen, and therefore can't comment - I only referred to languages I know.