Question posted by reader Ver in response to my “English Plain and Simple” column in The Manila Times, June 7, 2014:
Please help. I often encounter sentences where there is an “-s” in the noun as in the following: 1. “Let us all take care of our hearts.” 2. “We should wash our faces daily.” Is the use of “-s” in these sentences correct? Thank you very much!
My reply to Ver:
Yes, the use of “-s” to pluralize the objects “hearts” and “faces” is grammatically correct. This is because the presence of the adjective “our” as modifier of these objects makes it mandatory for them to be plural in a collective sense—meaning that there are as many hearts as the members of the collective “we” or “us” that’s making the statement.
By simple inspection, we can readily see that the object in both Sentence 1 and Sentence 2 can’t be rendered correctly in its singular form, as follows: 1.” Let us all take care of our heart.” 2. “We should wash our face daily.” To do so creates the wrong sense that the collective “we” or “us” have only one heart or one face, which of course isn’t the case at all.
However, the situation will be different if the object is singular by nature or if its number is specified by the speaker, as in the case of the noun “planet” or “bathroom” in the following sentences: 3. “Let us all take care of our planet.” 4. “We should keep our bathroom clean at all times.”
In Sentence 3, it’s obvious that although the ownership of the noun “planet” is collective, there’s actually only one planet being referred to, so the plural modifier adjective “our” doesn’t necessarily require the object “planet” to be plural as well.
On the other hand, despite the presence of the plural modifier “our,” the object “bathroom” in Sentence 4 is in the singular form because this is the sense intended by the speaker—meaning that the collective “we” (perhaps a family living under one roof) happens to have only one bathroom. But if the family happens to have two or more bathrooms, that object could as well be rendered in the plural, as follows: “We should keep our bathrooms clean at all times.”
Indeed, what ultimately determines whether the object in a sentence should be singular or plural is not the modifying possessive adjective (“our,” “its,” “their,” “his,” “her”) but the nature of the object or the specific sense intended for it by the speaker.
