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Modern English Grammar English 2126		Contact Form

Pronoun Agreement Error

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Introduction to the problem

Pronouns are marked

• for grammatical person (i. e., marked for point of view, as speaker, addressee, or other participant),
• for number (i. e., marked as singular or plural),
• for gender (i. e., marked as feminine, masculine, or neutral), and
• for case (i. e., marked as subject or object or genitive case).

See Table 1 below.

Pronoun errors involving person ranks 11^th in the Connors and Lunsford research, and we focus on those problems separately.

Here, we focus on problems of pronoun agreement in grammatical number. Pronouns usually share a reference with another grammatical constituent, called the antecedent, mentioned earlier in the discourse or found (implicitly or explicitly) in context. As with subject-verb agreement, where subjects must agree in number with verbs, a pronoun must agree in number with its antecedent. Failing to do that creates the error patterns we will discuss here.

Table 1: Pronoun inflections

Inflection type	Meaning & Use	Examples
Person	Marks the pronoun's point of view First person: speaker's point of view Second person: addressee's point of view Third person: point of view of the other, not speaker or addressee	I, we you she, he, it
Number	Marks pronoun's grammatical number Singular Plural	she, he, it they
Gender1	Marks pronoun's grammatical gender Feminine Masculine Neutral	she he it
Case2	Marks the pronoun's grammatical function subject case object case genitive case	she, he, it, they, who her, him, it, them, whom her, his, its, their, whose

As we will discover below, pronoun-agreement agreement errors often arise when the sense of the word (e. g., everyone) gives us ambiguous clues regarding the word's grammatical number.  For instance, everyone seems to suggest 'plural' (through its meaning) and to suggest 'singular' in its form. (As a compound word, its root is one.) We will see many examples, in different structures, where this ambiguity between 'plural' meaning and 'singular' form arises from a contrast between grammatical concord and notional concord. Notional concord is the sense (the notion) of number that speakers and writers gather from the pronoun's meaning.

Examples

… writing … attends to the form of the antecedent … speech … attends to the meaning …

Examine the sentences below and decide if the sentence has a pronoun-antecedent agreement problem or not (i. e., correct or incorrect). Then hover your cursor over a sentence to see my comments.

1. Everyone wishes they could have a vacation in Hawaii right now.
2. John said that nobody wanted to know their scores on the test.
3. The search committee did not announce their decision yet.
4. Anyone who wants a free book can have his pick from that box by the door.
5. Each one of the children have an odd rash on their arms.

Note that I use American English in my responses to those example sentences above. In British English, collective nouns, like committee in sentence (3), can be either singular or plural, depending on context.

Discussion

Table 2, below, outlines the three different operating principles at work when English users make decisions about a pronoun's grammatical number when speaking or writing.

Table 2: The differences between modes in determining number

Writing	Speech
attends to the form of the antecedent attends only to the head of the phrase functioning as antecedent (ignoring any plural words in modification of the head) proximity of the head to the pronoun should never influence choice of number	attends to the meaning of the antecedent attends to the whole phrase functioning as antecedent (including any plural words in modification of the head) proximity of the head to the pronoun can influence choice of number

When writing, English users look for inflectional clues in the antecedent when deciding number. English users concentrate on the head of the phrase that functions as the antecedent.  If the antecedent is a clause, traditionally English users treat the clause as a singular. Form matters most in these decision-making processes.

When speaking, English users concentrate on the notional idea of number expressed by the antecedent.  If the antecedent is notionally plural, in words like everyone (i. e., all people possible) or nobody (i. e., not one of all the possible people) or anyone (i. e., any of the entire group of people), the tendency is to think and use plural, as in sentences (2) and (3) above. Also, in speech, if the last noun or nouns in the antecedent phrase are marked plural, even if those nouns are in postmodifiers, English users (with that idea of plurality in mind) will often use a plural pronoun, as in sentence (5) above.  Finally, if the sentence forces an English user to choose a gendered pronoun when the specification of gender adds nothing to the sentence's meaning, a plural pronoun often replaces the more traditional choice of a masculine-gendered pronoun, as in sentence (4) above. Meaning matters most in these decision processes.

Postcedents

Postcendent refers to a relationship where the referent occurs after the pronoun. Confer sentences (6) and (7), for example.

6. It cheers me that she remembered my birthday. [clause as postcedent in an it-cleft sentence]
7. When it stops falling, I'll go out and shovel the snow. [noun phrase as postcedent]

Antecedent and postcedent alike describe a dependency relationship in that the grammatical number of the co-referential constituent governs the grammatical number of the pronoun.

We see more examples of postcedents in sentences (8) and (9) below.  In sentence (8), we see a common pronoun agreement error. Traditionally, data, the postcedent, is plural, a member of a group of Latin and Greek words borrowed into English in both their singular (datum) and plural (data) forms. (See the subject-verb agreement page for more information.)  In sentence (8), traditional users of English would prefer these final data were instead.

8. We finished collecting the results of our experiment, finding that this final data was sufficient to support our hypothesis.
9. Twitter, Facebook, and other social media create a news landscape unlike the one we inhabited just a generation ago. These digital media allow the scoundrel to exploit the ignorant.

In sentence (9) above, we see another commonly used plural word borrowed into English from Latin, media. There, a traditional user of English would find nothing objectionable: the pronoun referring to media is plural as well as the verb, allow. Both the pronoun and the verb agree in number with the head, media, as a traditional user would expect.

Conclusion

If we think about the history of English, we see a movement away from the use of grammatical inflections to mark grammatical gender, case, number, mood, etc. in many word classes, including pronouns.  Instead, structural changes in context, word order, function words, etc. convey those meanings. The error patterns we see here indicate that the historical shifts of the past continue into contemporary language.  Meaning and context are becoming a larger part of the system of grammatical number in Modern English.

More resources

Darling, Charles. Pronouns and Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement

Escalas, Maggie. Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement

The Purdue OWL. Using Pronouns Clearly

Notes

¹ Gender bias in pronoun usage has a long history and forms the focus of many linguistic studies.  However, we do not study the problem here. Remember that this series of articles revolve around the 20 most common error patterns identified in research of Connors and Lunsford.  Gender bias problems did not make the top 20 errors in their research.

² Usage errors involving grammatical case in pronouns are not covered here, though several are common sources of conversation, such as who / whom.  Remember that this series of articles revolve around the 20 most common error patterns identified in research of Connors and Lunsford.  Pronoun case problems did not make the top 20 errors in their research.

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