Grammar Question: Remain vs. Remains

[SciFiSam]

@Gary_T

And that’s how I see it, but here’s how I think others are seeing it:

One of what? One of the few true partnerships. And besides being one of those partnerships, it remains…

If I were trying to express that meaning, I would say “Founded in 1900, Company XYZ is one of the few true partnerships, and it remains among the top banking firms of the world.”

The word “that” seems much more naturally associated with “partnerships” than with “XYZ,” especially since there’s no comma between “partnerships” and “that.” Given the overall sentence structure I find it awkward and somewhat convoluted to see XYZ as the subject of remains, rather than to see partnerships as the subject of remain.

OK. But this is GQ. Why are people replying if they have no understanding of linguistics? This wasn’t a question about what would sound more natural, but what is correct.

@PatrickLondon

Well, that’s the point. We only have the evidence of the sentence itself to go on: it certainly doesn’t state that there are no other partnerships in banking.

It seems pointless to indicate that there are a few other partnerships (in unspecified fields of activity, but we know that across the whole range of commercial activity there are plenty), if the object of the sentence is to indicate that XYZ is the only partnership in banking. The construction seems intended to indicate that there are some (few) partnerships in banking, of which XYZ is one, in which case the verb is plural.

You do realise this is a linguistics question, yes, not a question about economics?

The part that talks about the partnerships is in a separate, embedded clause. You don’t need to overthink things - who is important, how many partnerships are there? That’s philosophy. Just break it down. Look at the actual words and how they function.