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Friday, July 25, 2025

Clearing up some syntactic matters

by

Dr Winford James
12 days ago
20250713

Every now and then, some­body asks me whether the bold­ed words in the fol­low­ing sen­tences are cor­rect.

1. “Every creed and race find an equal place.”

2. “Every­body has to pick up their bed and walk.”

3. “Every­body has to pick up his bed and walk.”

4. “Each per­son is the re­cip­i­ent of the ac­cu­mu­lat­ed cul­ture of the gen­er­a­tions which have pre­ced­ed him.”

5. “The user has to take re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for park­ing his or her car in this carpark.”

For avoid­ance of un­nec­es­sary con­fu­sion, I treat the reg­is­ter in which they are pro­duced as Stan­dard Eng­lish, and I note im­me­di­ate­ly that it is not ob­vi­ous whether they are cor­rect or not. I treat the op­por­tu­ni­ty as a teach­ing mo­ment, so al­low me to pro­vide brief analy­ses of each of them.

Sen­tence 1 fea­tures a co­or­di­nat­ed sub­ject com­posed of two nouns “creed” and “race” joined by the con­junc­tion “and”. Some peo­ple would ar­gue that the con­junc­tion plu­ralis­es the sub­ject and that there­fore the verb “find” is le­git­i­mate­ly in its plur­al form, that is, bare, un­analysed, un­in­flect­ed. But I would pro­pose that the co­or­di­nat­ed sub­ject con­tains the dis­trib­u­tive pro­noun “Every”, which in­di­vid­u­ates the two nouns. “Every” in­di­vid­u­ates “race” even though it is nei­ther au­di­ble nor vis­i­ble in the sen­tence; the lan­guage us­es a short­cut by mak­ing it phys­i­cal­ly ab­sent. And be­cause it in­di­vid­u­ates the two nouns, it se­lects the 3rd per­son sin­gu­lar form of the verb–finds.

Sen­tence 2 has the sub­ject “Every­body”, which is no­tion­al­ly plur­al but gram­mat­i­cal­ly sin­gu­lar, se­lect­ing the plur­al pronom­i­nal ad­jec­tive their to co-ref­er­ence with. Some would ar­gue that since “Every­body” is gram­mat­i­cal­ly sin­gu­lar, as “has” sug­gests (I don’t hear any­body say­ing “Every­body have” in Stan­dard Eng­lish), then their should give way to “his”. But in that case, they would be open­ing them­selves to the charge of sex­ism. Why not “her”?

I would ar­gue in­stead that, since “Every­body” is no­tion­al­ly both plur­al and gen­der-un­spe­cif­ic, it is more pro­gres­sive to go the way of their, which specif­i­cal­ly sat­is­fies our need for gen­der in­clu­siv­i­ty and for a sin­gu­lar pronom­i­nal anaphor for “Every­body”. (An anaphor here is an item that refers back to a word it stands for.) There is noth­ing in the gram­mar that is ei­ther a plur­al mas­cu­line or fem­i­nine pro­noun, so sin­gu­lar­is­ing their is pre­cise­ly the way to go, which is where the gram­mar goes.

Sen­tence 3 ex­changes their in the sec­ond for his. Those for whom his is an ac­cept­able anaphor for “Every­body” are au­to­mat­i­cal­ly ac­cept­ing the ac­cu­sa­tion that they are sex­ist in their pronom­i­nal choice. The rea­son is that, if “Every­body” in­cludes fe­males, which it must, then the pronom­i­nal anaphor in the sen­tence can­not be his.

The same ar­gu­ment holds for him in sen­tence 4. Pronom­i­nal him is an anaphor for “Each per­son”, which must in­clude males and fe­males, so it would be clear­ly sex­ist to use it in that way. The pronom­i­nal form their would be a handy al­ter­na­tive–on both no­tion­al and gram­mat­i­cal grounds.

Sen­tence 5 is per­haps the most fa­mous ex­am­ple of some users of Stan­dard Eng­lish avoid­ing the use of “they” or “their” in favour of “his or her”. They pre­fer to use the clear­ly awk­ward “his or her” when the sub­ject is sin­gu­lar, e.g., “The user” and “A user”. If the sub­ject was plur­al, such as “Users” and “The users”, then they would be hap­py and un­both­ered to use “their” and “they” as the anaphor.

In oth­er words, “they” and “their” are plur­al items and so are not to be used with sin­gu­lar sub­jects. On the one hand, the lan­guage is push­ing us in a com­mon­sense way, but on the oth­er, the aca­d­e­m­ic elites are im­pos­ing ar­ti­fi­cial re­stric­tions on nat­ur­al use.

Just to go back to the first sen­tence, “Every creed and race find an equal place”, whose sub­ject-verb con­cord I asked DeepSeek to clar­i­fy for me be­fore I be­gan to write. Here’s part of DeepSeek’s an­swer:

“This is a clas­sic case of com­pound sub­jects con­nect­ed by “and.” I re­mem­ber that usu­al­ly “and” makes the sub­ject plur­al, but “every” changes things … Let me men­tal­ly scan the gram­mar rules … When “every” pre­cedes mul­ti­ple sin­gu­lar nouns joined by “and,” it em­pha­sis­es each item in­di­vid­u­al­ly. So “every creed and race” means “every creed and every race” – im­ply­ing two sep­a­rate groups. That is why it takes a sin­gu­lar verb.”

DeepSeek talks of em­pha­sis of the in­di­vid­ual items and of a sin­gu­lar verb where­as I talk of the in­di­vid­u­at­ing func­tion of “Every” and of THIRD PER­SON sin­gu­lar nouns (and, con­se­quent­ly, third per­son sin­gu­lar verbs.)

I am sure that DeepSeek will be able to help clear up oth­er syn­tac­tic mat­ters for those who want to know more.

Win­ford James is a re­tired UWI lec­tur­er who has been analysing is­sues in ed­u­ca­tion, lan­guage, de­vel­op­ment, and pol­i­tics in Trinidad and To­ba­go and the wider Caribbean on ra­dio and TV since the 1970s. He has al­so writ­ten thou­sands of columns for all the ma­jor news­pa­pers in the coun­try. He can be reached at jay­win­ster@gmail.com


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