Basic Noun-Pronoun Agreement
Nouns and their pronouns make another set of teammates who must agree not only on the direction in which they are going to run, but on the type of play they are going to use to score a point. That is, they need to agree on two things:
Number (singular/one or plural/more than one)
Gender (male, female, neutral)
For example, the following sentences do not make sense since the pronouns do not agree with their nouns in number (1st sentence) or gender (2nd sentence):
Elvis sightings have occurred more abundantly in the last two years; he has been occurring at the rate of ten per month.
I know a woman who likes Elvis Presley's music so much, he trained her dog (named Elvis) to thump her tail and bark in rhythm to all of its tapes.
The sentences do make sense when the pronoun gender and number is straightened out:
Elvis sightings have occurred more abundantly in the last two years; they have been occurring at the rate of ten per month.
("Sightings" is the noun to which the pronoun refers; it is plural and thus requires the plural pronoun "they" to make sense. Note that the verb changes as well since verbs have to agree with their nouns [or pronouns].)
I know a woman who likes Elvis Presley's music so much, she trained her dog (named Elvis) to thump his tail and bark in rhythm to all of her tapes.
("Woman" is a feminine noun, so it requires the feminine pronoun "her." You can assume, because of its name, that the dog is male, so it would be more correct to say "his" tail. If you don't know the dog's gender, you could say "its" tail. Yet "its" does not make sense when referring to the tapes, since the neutral pronoun "its" implies that the tapes belong to the dog. So you could say "her tapes," to show that they belong to the woman, or "his tapes" to refer to the tapes of Elvis' singing.)
It's simple, right? Yet there are two major stumbling blocks with noun-pronoun agreement:
