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Collective nouns

This exercise looks at collective nouns and allows the students to see how they can be used as singular and plural. You are encouraged to examine the relationship between sentence constituents, such as subject and verb, and should discover that these are not always immediately adjacent.

Collective nouns are singular in form but refer to groups of people, animals, or things. In British English, they can be treated as both singular and plural. Some examples of such collective nouns are: family, government, team, England.

Look at the following examples (or find your own in the corpus) and decide if family is used in singular or plural. On what do you base your answer? Is it always clear whether it is singular or plural?
  • The family dominates Italian life and Naples is just one big family.’
  • The family finally returns home to Nazareth where Jesus grows strong in wisdom and
  • Her family had come to Bradford when she was about fourteen.
  • When it did this the family had been on the point of vesting the house in a charitable trust, which would have secured its future complete with contents.
  • Were her family offended at this shot-gun marriage?
  • In other companies a family owns a minority of shares, but still retains effective control because the smaller shareholders are too fragmented to defeat the voting power of the family concerned.
  • His family say he is a changed man.
  • The rest of my family was made up of three sisters — Sal, the eldest who was five and knew when she was born because it was in the middle of the night and had kept the old man awake, Grace who was three and didn't cause anyone to lose sleep, and red-headed Kitty who was eighteen months and never stopped bawling.
  • The family were not rich; much of their land had been sold to pay the debts of successive wastrel sons.

You can repeat the exercise with other collective nouns.

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