Hi while conducting a basic grammar workshop training at work one of my trainee had a query asking if (rather insisted) the following sentence was correct
One of my uncles stays in America.
One of my friends lives in America.
Accoring to Subject verb agreement the subject should agree with the very and not the noun or the pronoun so what i understand here is One is the subject and uncle is the noun so the verb must agree with One(subject) and not with (noun) uncle
So according to me the correct sentence would be
One of my uncle stays in America.
One of my friend lives in America.
however the trainee insisted that the 1st eg was correct as it was his English teacher how would always use these sentence and She is supposed to be a Phd in English literature could you please help me with this.
‘One of my’ Would be used to select one person from a group. For example, if you have more than one uncle, and one of them happens to live in America, you would use ‘One of my’. If you only had one uncle, you would simply say ‘My uncle’.
I agree with Jim. Saying “one of my friends” refers to one particular friend in a group that consists of all of your friends. Thus, it is necessary to use the plural word “friends”. The verb is in the third person singular so that it agrees in number with the word “one”. The verb should not agree with “friends” in number.
Thus the sentence “One of my friends lives in America” is grammatically correct, and that sentence is also completely natural.
The sentence “One of my uncles stays in America.” is grammatically correct. However, I’d like to mention that without any context to justify the use of that particular verb in the simple present tense, the sentence sounds a little awkward.
A sentence such as “One of my uncles stays at the Holiday Inn whenever he travels.” would sound more natural to me.
.