Sunday, July 29, 2012

grammaticality - Collective nouns treated as singular and plural in the same sentence

I have a problem with a sentence in a news announcement I'm writing. This is the sentence:



1) Company X is expanding and hires Person Y as their new CEO.




I've previously understood that it is correct to treat collective nouns, the company in this case, as singular or plural depending on if one refers to "the company itself" or "the people in the company". In this case, I'm referring to both (the company in itself is expanding, but the people are hiring someone as their new CEO). As such, the number of the pronoun does not agree with the number of the verb.



Two other possible versions that don't sound as right as the above are:



2) Company X is expanding and hire Person Y as their new CEO.



3) Company X is expanding and hires Person Y as its new CEO.



Which one is correct / do you prefer?

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