Monday, 14 September 2015

grammaticality - Singular action for a plural subject

Why not just add the word left or right? (Or am I being too simplistic?) In the past tense, the sentence could be:




They all pulled their left ear.



They all pulled their right ear.



They each pulled their right ear.



They each pulled their left ear.




I was tempted to use the "strictly" correct




They each pulled his or her left ear,




or




They each pulled his or her right ear,




but that would be too schoolmarm-ish (i.e., dogmatically strict).

No comments:

Post a Comment