Thanks to those of you who've talked to me about RAIN and to Lee for his nicely documented written response. As Lee accurately points out, many of these "grammar" issues are really usage questions, and I have another such issue.
When writing a bunch of test questions where students were supposed to respond with either the simply present tense or the present progressive, I wrote the following two sentences.
1a Albertson's ____________________________ (sell) many kinds of food.
1b This week-end, they _____________________ (sell) hamburgers outside.
It wasn't until I'd handed out the papers that I realized that I'd switched from a singular noun to a plural pronoun, yet even after re-reading the sentences several times, I could not refer to Albertson's as an "it" in the second sentence. Nonetheless, I had expected students to use the 3rd person singular form of the verb in sentence 1a.
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2 comments:
It seems to me that sentence 1b naturally needs a human subject because of the content (i.e. “selling hamburgers outside”) while the subject of sentence 1a is an entity.
But even if you change the content of sentence 1b by replacing “outside” with “for 99 cents a pack,” for example, it still sounds more natural to say “they sell.”
Carl Bache discusses the related topic of singular collective nouns and their agreeing pronouns (notional accord) on p. 101 of his 2000 book, Essentials of Mastering English: A Concise Grammar, published by Walter de Gruyter. (You can try Google Book Search for it.)
“Sometimes the coreferential pronouns they and their are used instead of it and its even in those cases where a collective noun selects the singular form of the verb.”
Bache’s example: The company needs a new managing director for their Paris branch.
Apparently, this use is quite acceptable. Take Bache's word for it: "The 'good language' requires consistency across all the relevant elements in the sentence, but inconsistency (as in the example above) is by no means uncommon."
I guess I second the official explanation. I would just file it under an impersonal pronoun. When you talk about a specific singular group, we sometimes use a plural pronoun in the same sense when when we don't know about a specific person. When we see a person whose sex we don't know, we would say "That person needs help. They need the police"
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