Grammar for are/is [duplicate]

I'd say Microsoft have a way of bending the rules and I know that McLaren have won the championship. While this sounds strange, I believe it is correct English (sorry, I'm not native).

But when it's a small company, would you still use it this way? Is a company always plural, or are small companies singular? I.e., would you say Bakery Johnson makes fine bread or Bakery Johnson make fine bread? Is it My book seller, Woody's, have moved or is it has moved?

Solution 1:

american-english

These company names are collective nouns. In general, in American English collective nouns almost always trigger singular verb agreement (after all, "Microsoft" is grammatically a singular noun, even if semantically it denotes an entity made up of many people). It is apparently much more common to use plural verb agreement in British English. It doesn't have anything to do with the size of the company.

Lots of good information here: Language Log on collective nouns, etc.

Solution 2:

British English treats collective nouns (corporations, departments, etc.) as plural. American English treats them as singular. The size of the group is irrelevant.

Solution 3:

I'm English (brought up near Oxford) and usually use the plural. For example, I used to work with an organization called the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and I was accustomed to writing “the IFS are”, not “the IFS is”. Or, speaking of local politics: “Oxford City Council do not build enough council houses”, rather than “Oxford City Council does not build enough council houses”. I didn't consciously decide to use this syntax: it's just how I was brought up, so it is probably typical of British English, at least in my part of England.

I've just discovered an ambiguous formulation which I feel vindicates my habit. There was a recent legal case where Google forced the founder of a cheap-alcohol-search Web site to change its name from Groggle to Drinkle.

So the question is whether to write “Google have a lot of lawyers” or “Google has a lot of lawyers”. In my opinion, the latter is ambiguous, because “Google” in the singular could denote the search engine -- which, not being animate, doesn’t own lawyers or anything else. Using the plural eliminates the ambiguity.

Solution 4:

I think it is most people's tendency to infer the people at the company as those doing the action described ("bending the rules") and therefore the plural sounds correct when that is the message you are trying to put across.

When it is the company as a single corporate entity, the singular works better ("Microsoft has bought Acme Widgets", "Acme has a great policy on renewable energy"). For this reason, I would say "Woody's has moved" as I presume the entire company, stock, and staff all went together.

You may find that some smaller companies deliberately use the plural when they want to emphasize the personal nature of things, real people doing/making stuff, or they will tend towards the singular when they want to sound bigger and more businesslike. "Acme recycles used paper" sounds like a corporate policy rather than the whim of one or more members of staff, even if there is only one person there.

It also leads to me to think about the corporate "we" - "At Microsoft, we write great software" is only true of a very small proportion of their staff who are actually developers/testers/project managers (arguably), and not of all staff such as sales and marketing etc. (I'm not getting into a debate about the proportion of MS software which is or is not great, save it for techcrunch).

Solution 5:

british-english

In British English:

A commercial company is not a (plural) collective noun. It is a (singular) legal entity. But it can be used as shorthand for a "group of people", and that is a plural collective noun.

So the company "Microsoft" is singular, but if you use the word "Microsoft" as shorthand for "the employees of Microsoft", that is plural.

Examples:

Microsoft is a software company from the United States

Microsoft were out celebrating Bill Gates's birthday last night

However, when it comes to sports teams and musical bands, though they might technically be a single entity they are normally treated as plural, even when referring to the single entity. From Wikipedia, for example: