So I was going through the day’s news and I came across a story on Ananova about the Lara plan in England. And the article opens with “England are planning to continue their short-pitched strategy against West Indies captain Brian Lara in an attempt to test his courage and try to limit his effectiveness in Saturday’s ICC Champions Trophy final.”
Is there some grammar rule I don’t know about when referring to a country as plural? Or is this a horrid, glaring, down-fall-of-the-world grammar mistake.
I think it is just that the quoted phraise refers to England the Cricket Team, not England the Country. A team is a plural entity so are is correct in that usage.
England are all out for 102 vs. England is near France.
Using plural verbs with collective nouns is one of the many ways American and British English differ. The same sentence in an American newspaper would use is.
Note that context is important. the use of “England” here is standing in for the longer noun phrase “the English cricket team”. So in a sense, the plural verb are is not following the singular country “England”, it is following the collective noun “team”.
In contexts where “England” refers to the country of England, it takes the verb is: England is my home.
This is British idiom. It is not the country that’s plural but the team. Think of it as shorthand for saying “The members of the team from England are…”
Yeah, but the same sentence spoken by an American MTV “Veejay” (do they even have those anymore?) would use “are” – “Duran Duran are planning a ten-month tour of the States…”. God, MTV were irritating.
My own preference in each of those would be “is”, not “are” (except it’s a flock of sheep, not a herd :smack: )
This one:
is interesting, as it seems to go against the “England are…” example above, but it just sounds right to say “is” in this instance. However, I would say (for example) “Manchester United are injury prone”. I can’t really offer any logic there, sorry…
We also use “are” with band names: “Limp Bizkit are a sack o’ shite,” for instance.
My own personal usage, which is not strictly proper American usage, is to contemplate whether the collective noun references the group as a whole or its members individually, as in these contrasting examples:
“The jury finds the defendant not guilty.” (I.e., acting as a group, we the jury arrived at this conclusion.)
“The jury are hopelessly deadlocked.” (I.e., as individuals, we jury members hold different views which cannot be resolved.)
“The committee recommends passage of this measure.” (We as a delegated group encourage the larger group which named us to review the measure to pass it.)
“The committee are largely in favor of the measure, but with a minority report which Mr. Jones will present.” (We’re divided 6-3 as individuals on this measure, and feel that both sides of the issue deserve presentation.)
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