Pronouns - singular or plural?
You have to be careful picking the right verb to use with some pronouns, especially indefinite pronouns (ones that don’t refer to a specific person or thing). Take this sentence as an example:
None of the dinosaurs were larger than a blue whale.
In this case, the indefinite pronoun ‘none’ takes a plural verb ‘were’. In this case, ‘none’ can be thought of as ‘not any’:
Not any of the dinosaurs were larger than a blue whale.
However, it can also take a singular verb, like in this sentence:
Jeremy told me that none of the paint was suitable.
When ‘none’ is used to describe a non-countable noun like ‘paint’, it often has a singular verb with it, like ‘was’ in this sentence. In the previous sentence, ‘dinosaurs’ is a countable noun - you can count how many ‘dinosaurs’ you have. However, you can’t count how many ‘paint’ you have.
Other pronoun problems can arise when you don’t know whether the subject of a sentence is the pronoun or the noun it represents:
Each of the tables is to be set up on the grass.
In this sentence you might think that ‘tables’ is the subject, and choose a plural verb form of the ‘to be’ verb - ‘are’. However, the actual subject in this sentence is the pronoun ‘each’, not ‘tables’. ‘Each’ is a singular pronoun, so it needs the singular verb - ‘is’. One way you can check this is to remove the ‘of the tables’ part from the sentence and see if it still makes grammatical sense:
Each is to be set up on the grass.
Yep! We don’t know what it is that is being set up now, but it’s still grammatically correct.
Click here to move on to the next topic: Compounded and non-compounded subjects