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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