personal pronoun
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Raymott
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Coach: Pick any of the guys on the team and practice with him/them.
'Guys' is still plural. Which is correct - him or them?
Coach: Pick one of the guys on the team and practice with him/them.
'Guys' is still plural. Which is correct - him or them?
Kondorosi
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Let us proceed step by step towards the solution:
The antecedent of 'X', with which 'X' has to agree in number and person, is 'any'.
The sense the OP's sentence conveys is 'any one' --> singular
guys = she? + he?
I think the extralinguistic context helps.
guys = some he --> him/them
guys = some she --> her/them
guys = some she + some he --> them/(him or her)
(them = gender neutral singular third person)
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mxreader
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In this sentence: "I don't want to play with him/them"
The context is not sufficient to determine the object, whether it is a "him" or a "them". Both are possible.
Raymott is pointing this out.
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Kondorosi
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mxreader
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Is this what an educated non-native would infer from my posts? My communication skills as an ESL teacher are not consummate yet, apparently.
:lol:
Kondorosi
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Is what? What is 'this' to you? This last quote suggests to me you included the definition of 'guys' that I presented in "I don't want to play with him/them". But you did not. If you did, your sentence would now look like this:
"I don't want to play with (him or her)/them," and that would be correct, provided your 'them' denotes the gender neutral singular pronoun. Plural pronoun is not correct, in my opinion, and the reasons I have already provided in words of one syllable in my first post in this thread.
lolmxreader
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Let me rephrase....Jasmin, you can answer this yourself depending who it is you are referring to. Was it a male individual? then use "him". Was it a group of individuals? then use "them". If it is an individual but you want to be vague I think we can still use "them".
Allen165
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"Them" sounds better to me, but I think "him" is correct because "any" refers to a single person in my sentence, i.e., "I don't want a single guy on the team to think..."
Kondorosi
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- Why him and why not her, IYO?
- 'them' is a strange pronoun. It can refer to a single person whose gender we do not know or we do not want to make known. And then it agrees with a plural verb. Crazy, isn't it? ;-)
Allen165
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But if "guys" refers only to men, then "him" is the only option, right?
Kondorosi
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Yes, but do we know that? 'Guys' may as well refer to, say, 23 women.
Allen165
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Yes, but I do know whom "any" refers to, and anyone aware of the context would too.
Thanks.
Kondorosi
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Do you know what strikes me as strange? 'any' is an indefinite pronoun, and 'him' is a definite pronoun. Given the circumstances, I doubt that 'him' can stand proxy for 'any'.
I have to come at the problem from a different direction.
In 'any of the guys,' 'any of' means 'whichever'. It means the head of the noun phrase is not 'any', but the plural 'guys'. 'guys' is definite and so is the plural 'them'. They can corefer. No problem.
EDIT: A pronoun can't have another pronoun as its antecedent.
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euncu
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I don't see a difference between "I don't want any of the guys..." and "I want none of the guys" or with a different approach, replacing "the guy" with "them", thus, we get "any of them"
Allen165
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Do you know what strikes me as strange? 'any' is an indefinite pronoun, and 'him' is a definite pronoun. Given the circumstances, I doubt that 'him' can stand proxy for 'any'.
I have to come at the problem from a different direction.
In 'any of the guys,' 'any of' means 'whichever'. It means the head of the noun phrase is not 'any', but the plural 'guys'. 'guys' is definite and so is the plural 'them'. They can corefer. No problem.
EDIT: A pronoun can't have another pronoun as its antecedent.
I'm not sure I understood your reply. Are you saying that only "them" is correct?
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