The company: singular or plural?

sbourque · Post by **sbourque** » Tue Dec 27, 2005 4:31 pm

Maybe this topic has been addressed before, but I've always wondered why BrE uses the plural with companies ("Ford have announced...") where we Yanks use the singular. I could understand if one is talking about the company as a group of individuals, but usually we think of a company as a whole.

tigertiger · Post by **tigertiger** » Wed Dec 28, 2005 12:21 am

They have announced.

Who have announced? The company have announced.

In BrE the company would not be he/she (has) or an inanimate it.

sbourque · Post by **sbourque** » Wed Dec 28, 2005 4:38 pm

Yes, I know that's WHAT they do, but why? Is it just custom? And now that I think about it, don't the Brits think of "family" as plural as well? We say "My family lives in..." or "comes from..." but I recall teaching from texts that use the plural form. (Specifically, the so-called "American" Cutting Edge, where all the excerpts are from British sources and all the prices you see are in pounds sterling.)

strider · Post by **strider** » Mon Jan 02, 2006 3:10 pm

There are lots of nouns in English that can be thought of as being both singular and plural. 'Company' is one example, here are some others 'audience, government, public, team, union...'

- The government plan to introduce a new law
- The government plans to introduce a new law

- The audience were delighted
- The audience was delighted

I haven't heard of this as being a British/American difference, I think it's more to do with the speaker's perception of the noun (the government as a single unit or as lots of individual members, for example).

There's a good explanation in Business Grammar Builder by Paul Emmerson.

Lorikeet · Post by **Lorikeet** » Mon Jan 02, 2006 6:52 pm

strider wrote:
I haven't heard of this as being a British/American difference...

I think it must be, because all of the plural forms sound "wrong" to me. I explain to my students that it isn't wrong, but that it's British English. All of these sound weird:

My family are going. My union are interested in that subject. The company are going to sell the cars cheaper. The team have red shirts. Ugh.

Superhal · Post by **Superhal** » Mon Jan 02, 2006 8:23 pm

It may be a different rule. In tests on native AmE's, it was found that there is actually an aural rule rather than a grammar rule. AmE's want 1 "s" sound in either the subject and verb, not 2, not 0.

So, in a sentence such as:
The group of doctors is/are...
Native speakers who do not apply the explicit rule will go either way 50% of the time.

sbourque · Post by **sbourque** » Wed Jan 04, 2006 4:54 pm

Superhal, that is exactly the kind of sentence my high school English teacher used as a trick question. She explained that the subject was "group" (singular); "of doctors" a prepositional phrase modifying "group"; and so we needed to use a singular verb to agree with the singular subject. And then we went on to diagram the sentence. (Now I'm showing my age.)

What's odd is that I'd say "A group of doctors from Britain is arriving tomorrow. They will be visiting..."

Another reason to be glad I'm a native speaker and don't have to learn all this complicated grammar!