Jose Carillo's English Forum
Joe Carillo's Desk => You Asked Me This Question => Topic started by: Joe Carillo on February 10, 2015, 11:25:12 PM
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Question e-mailed by Mr. Eusebio Tanicala from Baguio City (February 9, 2015):
Dear Sir:
A collective noun usually acts as a singular noun. My question is this: When does a collective noun unusually or exceptionally act otherwise?
For example, the noun “team” is a collective noun. While the team has a practice session, the team manager tells a laundry man: “Please collect their uniforms inside their cabinets.” Is the plural pronoun “their” correct? If yes, what do we call this switch to the plural pronoun yet we have a collective noun in the background.
Thanks in advance.
Bios
My reply to Bios:
By definition, a “team” is a number of persons associated together in work or activity. As such, “team” is indeed a collective noun that’s grammatically singular but notionally plural. It is grammatically singular when used in the sense of a group pitted against another group in a competitive activity like sports or combat, as in the sentence “The team is confident of beating the defending champion tonight.” On the other hand, “team” becomes plural in sense when it refers to its individual members and not to the group as a whole and the action is done by the members individually, as in “The team are quarreling among themselves.” To establish notional agreement between subject and verb in such situations, the plural verb form “are” and the reflexive “themselves” are used.
For the same reason, the team manager in your example is grammatically correct when he tells the laundry man, “Please collect their uniforms inside their cabinets.” It’s clear between the two of them that the antecedent of the plural possessive adjective “their” are the individual members of the team and not the team as a whole. There would therefore be a serious notional disagreement if the team manager used the singular possessive adjective “its” instead: “Please collect its uniforms inside its cabinets.” (The laundry man certainly will find this statement of the team manager queer!) Another consideration in not using “its,” of course, is that “its” is a singular possessive adjective for the neuter gender, which as we know is generally not used for persons.
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