Thanks Bruce,

This is what I thought as well. This question should have been
excluded as a bad item.

This is what happens when people who do not know grammar try to
write "grammar" questions. The odd thing about it is that
responses to these "grammar" questions are then supposed to
demonstrate whether or not a candidate understands a text or not.
It is totally ludicrous and only done because "that's what people
have always done."

This pretty much sums up EFL.

The good news is there is very little actual education going on,
so little opportunity to confuse. It's all exam prep. People
learn English despite the horrible instruction (and testing) they
get, not because of it.

Mark


On Fri, Dec 16, 2011, at 04:35 PM, Bruce Despain wrote:

To my thinking the test question is horrible!  In my mind the
sentences are a poor illogical ellipsis for:

"The lynx belongs to the family felidae and is a mammal.  Other
members of the family felidae are the wildcat, cougar, and
cheetah."

When the adjective "other" of this sentence becomes a pronoun
"others" it becomes a referent to members of the family felidae,
not to the familly felidae as a whole.  The only members
mentioned in the paragraph are the lynx and those other three.
To be accurate it would have to be something like: "Others (of
the family) include the wildcat, cougar, and cheetah."  Maybe
some people are used to "reference" being to an antecedent, but
in this case "the family felidae" is like "mammal" — too
all-inclusive to be the referent.  It's like the problem
with "Ambrose jumps higher than any student in the school," which
should logically be "Ambrose jumps higher than any other student
in the school."  "Other" is meant to exclude Ambrose, just as
"others" above is meant to exclude the lynx, which is explicitly
included in the family felidae.
[This lesson must be one of those discarded from the traditional
grammars over the years.]

Bruce Despain

--- [log in to unmask] wrote:
From: M C Johnstone <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: "others are" pronoun referent
Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 21:04:55 +0300

Hello,

A sentence on this pattern came up as an proposed item for a
standardized test recently:

"The lynx belongs to the family felidae and is a mammal. *Others*
are the wildcat, cougar, and cheetah."

It is a multiple choice item. The question stem is "What does the
word *others* in line ## refer to?"

Two of the choices are:

A. felidae
B. wildcat, cougar, and cheetah

I'm not sure whether felidae is singular or plural, that depends
on whether it is nominative or genitive case. I don't think it
matters since the word functions as an adjective modifying
"family" and so must be singular in English.

So, it is difficult to see how the plural pronoun "others" can
refer to a singular felidae family.  It seems more closely
associated with "wildcat, cougar and cheetah" though this phrase
is the complement of "are" and not a pronoun referent.

According to the item writer, the word "others" refers to
"felidae."

This is part of a reading comprehension test and so raises
another question: how can identification of the correct pronoun
referent can be interpreted as evidence of comprehending a text?

Mark






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