Hi,
Of course all this talk about is/are and was/were does get a bit wonky if you say something like: The football team was behaving like drunken hooligans when this really means The football team was behaving like drunken hooligans do. Doesn’t that cry out for ‘were’ whether you’re in the UK or the USA?
Alan
Here is another good example which shows how the word ‘army’ can be treated as a plural noun:
“And who is such a group?”
“Who knows?”
“The Underground Army?”
“They’re not exactly inconspicuous. They killed Judge Fernandez in Texas.”
“Don’t they use bombs?”
“Yeah, experts with plastic explosives.”
“Scratch them.”
“I’m not scratching anybody right now.”[YSaerTTEW443543]
TOEIC short conversations: An employee is leaving the company[YSaerTTEW443543]
Good Example Torsten, but note that you would not say “The Underground Army are not conspicuous.” You’d have to say is.
It’s the same reason your first sentence is “And who is such a group” instead of “And who are such a group.”
Hi,
I would say The Underground Army are …, begging your pardon.
Alan
Would you use are in this sentence?
“And who is such a group?”
It could just as easily “really” mean this: “The football team was behaving like a bunch of drunken hooligans.”
No, not in the US it doesn’t.
However, as I’ve already mentioned, if the word “they” is used later (in a subsequent sentence, for example) to refer back to the team in terms of the members of the team, then a plural verb would naturally be used with the word “they”.
This topic has been discussed here before. It seems no matter how many Americans tell you the same thing, you just can’t quite seem to believe that here in the US we quite happily and typically say “the team was” or “the audience was” even if we refer back to the team or the audience in the very next sentence as “they” – at which point we will just as happily say “they were”. 
english-test.net/forum/ftopic1749.html
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Hi Drew,
Reckon I could just about say: Who are such a group? After all it’s no battier than: It’s raining yesterday.
Alan
Here is another example illustrating how the word ‘company’ is treated as a ‘plural noun’ similar to the word ‘staff’:
Well, I don’t know how much you know but the company have been having some problems. Quite a few staff have been laid off actually.[YSaerTTEW443543]
TOEIC short conversations: A woman is sending a bulk order to India[YSaerTTEW443543]
Egad! Ick! Fess up, Torsten. You got that sentence from a speaker of British English, didn’t you? The use of “have” in that sentence sounds pretty darn strange to my American ears. lol
Your other sentence would be more likely from an American speaker of English, but I’d say that the use of “a few” also plays a role. Basically, “a few (of anything)” is always plural.
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[size=75]“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.” ~ Albert Einstein[/size]
Hello again, Torsten.
Ask your British colleagues whether they would ever consider saying this:
“A few company have been having problems.”
Regardless of whether a singular or plural verb is used with the phrase “a few company”, my bet is that the none of your British colleagues will agree that it is correct or natural.
Saying “a few staff” is OK, but saying “a few company” is not.
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[size=75]“Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.” ~ Benjamin Franklin[/size]
Amy, who used or mentioned the phrase ‘a few company’? As far as I can see you are the first person to bring it up here on the forum. This might be a bit confusing if not even misleading to many of our ESL learners, don’t you think?[YSaerTTEW443543]
TOEIC short conversations: Making arrangement for a business meeting[YSaerTTEW443543]
Hi Torsten,
Good point. You’re right, the last thing we want to do is to confuse or mislead our learners.
Alan
Especially when it comes to such a sensitive issue as the differences between British and American English which some people always harp on about. Long live ‘International English’![YSaerTTEW443543]
TOEIC short conversations: A caller wants to be connected to a hotel guest’s room[YSaerTTEW443543]
Well, I think that my statement that it is not OK to say “a few company” was actually pretty understandable. Hmmm. I wasn’t expecting that to be particularly difficult or tricky for you.
I realize that conceptual ideas can sometimes be fairly difficult to grasp. However, I do think that incorrect phrase may possibly shed some light on the difference in usage that has been under discussion in this thread (a thread that was initiated by you, after all). That incorrect phrase may be useful for getting a feel for when/why an American speaker’s usage would differ from that of a British speaker of English when it comes to using (or not using) a plural verb with a noun that is singular in form.
The idea here is that a word such as “staff”, which can also be comfortably used in wording such as “a few staff”, is a more likely candidate for usage with a plural verb form in AmE than a word such as “company” or “team” (neither of which would be appropriate in that phrase). In other words, here in the US, it’s more likely that you’ll hear “The staff were…” used on occasion, and it’s rather unlikely that you’ll hear “The company were…” or “The firm were” etc.
Hmmm, based on that statement, it would seem you do indeed think that Barron’s ought to change their test – so that it is more international and less American.
Ultimately, what this boils down to is the fact that the use of “was” accurately reflects usage in American English. But, hey, why bother asking this question here in the forum if you don’t like or don’t want to believe the answers you get here? You could just write to Barron’s and ask them directly why they included “were” as an incorrect option or whether they think “was” is really the only correct option.
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[size=75]“The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.” ~ Charles Dickens[/size]
As I understand it, TOEIC stands for Test of English For International Communication rather than ‘American Communication’.[YSaerTTEW443543]
TOEIC short conversations: Taking food order[YSaerTTEW443543]
It does, but with only 60 million out of 500 million speaking British English which is likely to be the more “international” variety?
Drew, can you think of any other countries in addition to Great Britain where English is spoken as the first language? Also, there is a considerable number of speakers in North America who don’t speak English as their native language.[YSaerTTEW443543]
TOEIC short conversations: Assessing bids[YSaerTTEW443543]
I can think of plenty of other countries and for me it’s not a cultural we’re better than them thing. Most of the unique attributes of British English (like this issue with subject-verb agreement) only developed during the second half of the 20th Century and only in the UK itself. This means that these matters of usage are unique to Great Britain and not to the entire commonwealth and former empire (Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, etc). This means that even though these countries may have a variety of English that has much in common historically with that of the UK that in fact the special BrE forms are not part of their usage.
From a standpoint of linguistic study, the English of the UK is facinating compared to that of the US/Canada which comes off as quite boring really because its so similar from place to place. North American English is very standardised with only slight differences in pronunciation and some regionalism. Nowhere on Earth however has more disparity in dialects of a single language as does the UK. There is so much difference between the pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and even chosen forms in the UK. The differences are geographic with Newcastle and Essex sounding as if they are totally different languages sometimes, and even within greater London huge differences exist. The differences are also social and economic with different classes of people having vastly different varieties of English – but all within that family of BrE. From a teaching standpoint this creates an issue. Do you teach RP English even though barely anyone actually speaks it? Or, do you choose a particular UK variety that is common and teach that? Do you teach students to omit the letter ‘t’ in the middle of a word or to add some other common attribute that a certain group in the UK uses (but that others don’t)?
The way I see it, you have 20 million native speakers in Canada, 315-320 million in the US, 5-10 million in Mexico, 20-30 million in the Philipines, and various others in the Caribbean and Polynesia for whom North American English is their variety. It amounts to over 75% of English speakers speaking one variety that is very stable and similar among its speakers versus 12% speaking another variety that is very different from one speaker to another and which has a much looser grammar and vocabulary.
Really, if we want to go toward teaching a variety of English that’s not North American, we should be teaching Indian English which is second to NAE. Even then, Indian English has been moving steadily closer to North American English in usage of vocabular, grammar forms, and pronunciation.
The other argument to consider is that any British English speaker can understand NAE, but many non-UK speakers don’t have a clue what a lot of BrE forms mean.
So you see, it’s not a cultural debate, it’s one of logical selection of which one to spend classroom resources on: Standardized form used by 75% of Speakers versus non-standardized form used by some of 12% of speakers?
Isn’t English an official language in India? There are more than 1 billion people living there.
So doesn’t that mean that British English is spoken by more people?
Nope!
It means Indian English, which is the 2nd most spoken variety of English on the planet is spoken there.
Indian English has some characteristics of British English and Some of North American English. However, it’s important to realize that most things that are characteristic of British English have only developed within the past 50 years. So that when India was part of the Empire, even the British didn’t speak that way and thus neither would Indians who spoke mostly British English.