Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2001 09:54:17 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Salvo Bartolotta <bartequi@neomedia.it> Cc: "Bruce A. Mah" <bmah@FreeBSD.ORG>, Dima Dorfman <dima@unixfreak.org>, mwlucas@blackhelicopters.org, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: docs/30203: description of security profiles in FAQ is just plain wrong Message-ID: <20010901095417.A618@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <999306309.3b903445f411a@webmail.neomedia.it>; from bartequi@neomedia.it on Sat, Sep 01, 2001 at 03:05:09AM %2B0200 References: <999306309.3b903445f411a@webmail.neomedia.it>
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Salvo Bartolotta said on Sep 1, 2001 at 03:05:09: > >> "...what each of the security profiles does". The verb (does) doesn't > >> agree in number with the subject (profiles). Or something like > > >Actually, the subject is "each", which is singular. I'm pretty sure > >Michael is right on this one. > > As others have pointed out, this is essentially correct. > > More precisely, "each of" is used before a pronoun or determiner (the, my, > those...); the pronoun or noun is plural. As subject, "each of + plural > expression" is *usually* followed by a singular verb; however, the verb can > be plural in an informal style. > > The use of "each" makes us think of things/people "separately". This explains > why "nearly every + countable noun" is preferred to "nearly each + (countable > noun)"; it also explains the (normal) singular verb in the foregoing. But it's also singular for "every" -- for instance, "nearly every sheep has four legs" where "sheep" and "has" are both singular. But it would be plural with "all". When you prefer a plural, you'd probably say "what all of the security profiles do" but in this case that's probably inappropriate. Also it leads to ambiguity: do you mean they all do it together, or any one of them does it? > > The prepositional phrase "of the security profiles" confuses things a > > bit. A trick that my seventh-grade English teacher Mrs. Cantrell taught > > me was to take out the prepositional phrase (which is optional in a > > structural sense anyways) and see if the sentence still seems > > correct...in this case, "each [...] does" vs. "each [...] do". > > Sorry, but Mrs Cantrell was plain wrong. :-) > > The reasons originate in syntax, as it were, interwoven with semantics, "a > number of people are wrong" being a trivial counter-example. It certainly *sounds* wrong but that's perhaps more to do with common usage than formal rules of syntax or semantics. That is, the word "number" could grammatically be a collective noun, but here the phrase "a number of people" is normally taken as a single, plural unit with a specific connotation (you won't replace "a" with "the" in the next sentence, for instance). This roughly agrees with what your faq says. Collective nouns aren't clear-cut too; I was having an argument with someone once about this. Do you say "the committee has met" or "the committee have met"? He said the English prefer the latter (today, at least) and the Americans prefer the former. However, the plural looks wrong to me: you would normally say "This is the committee" not "these are the committee". It's less clear-cut with "This is a number of people" versus "These are a number of people" but that's probably because this isn't a collective noun, but a common phrase which is taken to be plural by convention; replace "number" with "crowd" or "team" or "group" or anything else and the singular definitely looks better (to me, anyway). Besides, English is full of inconsistencies. For instance, grammarians will tell you to say "It is I" and not "It is me", but this is inconsistent with the usage with any other verb (try replacing "is" with "likes", "bites", etc). - Rahul To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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