Grammar Question: Remain vs. Remains

[PatrickLondon]

@Blaster_Master

Aside from my previous argument of removing the prepositional phrase, it’s very clear that the focus of the sentence is on Company XYZ. Consider, the sentence starts by saying “Founded in 1900”, which clearly modifies the company, it’s highly unlikely, and grammatically wonky, if it were intended to be modifying the various partnerships. Further, if you look at the rest of the sentence after the verb “among the best banking firms in the world”, again, it’s clearly about Company XYZ and not the partnerships. It just doesn’t make sense that we’d have two clear references to this bank, but then intend to emphasize the partnerships. As such, the subject of the verb “remain(s)” must be “one”, referencing the bank, and so it should be the singular conjugation.

The other trick is, just intuitively, speaking it out-loud, it just sounds wrong as “remain”, and it sounds horribly wrong saying it as “remain” with the prepositional phrase removed.

The focus of the sentence may be Company XYZ, but the grammatical subject of the sentence is “the few true partnerships” - unless the author is trying to say that only Company XYZ and no others of “the few true partnerships” remain (etc., etc.). But if that’s what s/he is trying to say, why mention any others at all? By definition, Company XYZ would be unique in remaining a true partnership in the banking world.