Monday, October 22, 2018

grammar - Verb agreement: We [company name]


I have seen a company description as follows:
We [company name] is a specialized manufacturer of…
Is the verb agreement correct here?



Answer



It's an appallingly ungrammatical construction, caused by someone trying to slavishly follow the principle that in American English, collective nouns almost always trigger singular verb agreement. That issue doesn't arise in "British English", since we quite naturally use singular or plural for things like company, family, group, according to context.



But I don't think any competent speaker (not even an American) would actually produce OP's example. So presumably the company (or at least, the speaker) is not a native speaker of English.


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