If I hear "they" are foreign" I'm capable of any or all of the following as situationally relevant:
* deciding if singular or plural is relevant based on the antecedent.
* deciding if singular or plural is relevant based on other context.
* deciding if the singular or plural actually meaninfully changes the meaning of the statement within it's context and not worrying about if it doesn't.
* in the vanishingly rare cases where it's meaningful, contextually unclear, and I am still unsure, I can ask.
I may be an imbecile, but fortunately it takes only a minuscule amount of mental power to handle all this. English has a lot of redundancies and deducing from context is built into the language.
So when hear a simple snippet "they are foreign" I assume either it will become clear from further context, or it doesn't matter how many people "they" refers to since someone is having a tantrum about pronoun usage.
Perhaps what's really bothering you isn't that I pointed out the historicity of a common, centuries-old pattern in the English language, but rather that someone missed naptime and is grumpy.
vira28 · · focus · HN ↗
jankyxenon · · focus · HN ↗
vira28 · · focus · HN ↗
sophacles · · focus · HN ↗
srggsegg · · focus · HN ↗
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sophacles · · focus · HN ↗
* deciding if singular or plural is relevant based on the antecedent.
* deciding if singular or plural is relevant based on other context.
* deciding if the singular or plural actually meaninfully changes the meaning of the statement within it's context and not worrying about if it doesn't.
* in the vanishingly rare cases where it's meaningful, contextually unclear, and I am still unsure, I can ask.
I may be an imbecile, but fortunately it takes only a minuscule amount of mental power to handle all this. English has a lot of redundancies and deducing from context is built into the language.
So when hear a simple snippet "they are foreign" I assume either it will become clear from further context, or it doesn't matter how many people "they" refers to since someone is having a tantrum about pronoun usage.
Perhaps what's really bothering you isn't that I pointed out the historicity of a common, centuries-old pattern in the English language, but rather that someone missed naptime and is grumpy.