![]() For more on the difference between a country and a nation, make sure you read our article on this topic. “Country” is generally a countable collective noun that we use to refer to a nation as representative of its population. The main question hinges around whether we regard a country as a singular entity or as a multitude of individuals. ![]() In this article, we will explore using the collective noun “country” while maintaining proper subject-verb agreement with “has” and “have.” Collective nouns can be trickier than you might think since American and British English actually treat them differently. Grammatically, we refer to this as subject-verb agreement. The third-person singular refers to anyone or anything but the speaker/writer or the addressee. ![]() “The country has” is the correct form in this case because we generally treat collective nouns as singular, and we refer to “country” as an “it” in the third person. There are up to a dozen “rules” surrounding their use, but before we start to panic, let’s reduce the rules to their simplest form, using one example: do we use “the country has” or “the country have”? The use of “has” or “have” is one of those verbal conjugations that can confuse English speakers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |