Plurality

Question

Suppose there are many companies. And each company has many resources. Which of the following is the correct way of describing the resources? (or are both incorrect?)"company's resources" or "companies' resources".

Clive · Accepted Answer

Hi,

Suppose there are many companies. And each company has many resources. Which of the following is the correct way of describing the resources? (or are both incorrect?)

"company's resources" or "companies' resources".

It somewhat depends on how you word your sentence. However, generally speaking, both phrases can be ambiguous. The problem is to show that each company has multiple resources. To be really clear, you need to get a bit more wordy. You might say something like 'the resources of each individual company'. As I said, it depends on the rest of the wording in your context.

Best wishes, Clive

BarbaraPA · Answer

You say there are many companies, which is plural. Company's resources says only one company. Companies' means belonging to more than one company. So companies' resources is correct.

Logically, you assume that each company has more than one resource, but in the similar construction "the girls' hats," you don't know if each girl has only one hat or more than one hat. It's ambiguous. You need other clues from context or you need to rewrite in a way such as "the resources [plural] of each of the many companies" or, in the latter example, "each girl's hat" or "each girl's hats" to avoid all ambiguity.

Plurality

Top answer

Get the Weekly English Kit 📬

Related Questions