#1 (permalink) Sun Jun 28, 2009 16:03 pm SAT question: Noun number agreement |
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Hello teachers.
(1)Puzzled, the children scratched their (head / heads). (2)Many sons dislike their (fathers / father). (3)The boys moved their (car / cars).
found this examples while surfing the Web. The site explains like this. (1) requires "head"; otherwise, the sentence implicates multi-headed childrenand. (2) also requires "father" because students have only one father, and plural "fathers" indicates that sons have more than one fagther. (3) could have either a car or cars because (a) plural implicates that each boy owned a car, and (b) singular implicates that boys (together) owned a car.
Is this explanation correct? As far as I know, singular nouns link to singular predicate, and plural nouns link to plural predicate. Therefore, all four cases need plural nouns in the predicate.
waiting for you replies... |
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Ecoke0005 I'm new here and I like it ;-)
Joined: 18 Jun 2009 Posts: 24
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