pronoun reference agreement?

David lent his motorcycle to someone who allowed their friend to use it.

Since someone is singular, you need a singular pronoun to refer to it. In this case, it would be "who allowed his or her friend to use it."

thank you

Ah, pronoun reference agreement can be a tricky thing! In this sentence, we have a slight inconsistency. "David" is referred to by the pronoun "his," which is fine. However, when it comes to the person who allowed their friend to use it, we have a bit of a problem. "Their" is a pronoun that is typically used as a plural pronoun. So, to maintain agreement, we could change the sentence to something like, "David lent his motorcycle to someone who allowed his friend to use it." This way, the pronouns "his" and "his" agree in terms of gender and number.

The pronoun reference agreement in the given sentence is incorrect. In the sentence, "David lent his motorcycle to someone who allowed their friend to use it," the pronouns "their" and "it" do not have clear antecedents.

To correct the pronoun reference agreement, you can either:

Option 1: Maintain the gender consistency:
"David lent his motorcycle to someone who allowed his friend to use it."

Option 2: Remove pronoun ambiguity:
"David lent his motorcycle to someone who allowed a friend to use the motorcycle."

By choosing either Option 1 or Option 2, the sentence will have correct pronoun reference agreement.

Pronoun reference agreement refers to the matching of pronouns with the nouns they are referring to in a sentence. In the given sentence, we have two pronouns to analyze: "someone" and "their."

To ensure pronoun reference agreement, we need to make sure that the pronouns match in number and gender with their antecedents (the nouns they refer back to). Let's break down the sentence and identify the antecedents:

"David lent his motorcycle to someone who allowed their friend to use it."

- Antecedent 1: "someone"
- Antecedent 2: "their friend"

The pronoun "someone" is singular, so we should use a singular pronoun to refer back to it. However, the pronoun "their" is plural, typically used to refer to multiple people. This creates a mismatch in number agreement.

To correct the pronoun reference agreement, we could rephrase the sentence as:

"David lent his motorcycle to someone who allowed a friend to use it."

By replacing "their" with "a," we maintain agreement in number and avoid any confusion about how many people are involved.