THE THIRD

PERSON SINGULAR

IN ENGLISH

I am often surprised to discover that some of my students hardly recognize the third person singular of a verb unless it is in the form

he – she – it.

Of course that is how it appears in lists of verbs (conjugation), but that is only a starting point.

Students tend to forget to add the letter ‘s’ to the verb in the third person singular in the present tense of English.

The letter ‘s’ on the third person singular is the ONLY change the student has to remember in the present tense. It is a bad mistake to omit the letter ‘s’.

And it isn’t difficult to use it correctly.

The most important thing to remember is that a pronoun stands in for [‘pro’] a noun or a group noun; the pronouns, he, she, it represent something else. That is their job. It is your job to keep track of who or what that ‘something’ is.

No matter how complicated a sentence might be, we must be able to identify who is doing the action (the subject) and what the action (the verb) is.

In appropriate cases we also need to know who the recipient/receiver/victim of the action (the object) is. But for the moment we must concentrate on the third person singular of the present tense. You can remember the third person very simply –

“IF IT’S NOT YOU AND IT’S NOT ME,

AND THERE’S ONLY ONE OF IT,

IT MUST BE THE THIRD PERSON SINGULAR.”

Who else could it be?

So, for all those sentences that don’t simply say, ‘he, she, it’ you will have to consider the people, the things and even the actions that are represented by these three pronouns.

And you must remember that in the present tense these ‘third persons’ (alone) have the letter ‘s’ at the end of the verb.

Remember too, that the order of the ‘persons’ in verb lists

(conjugations) I, you, he, she, etcetera never changes.

This topic is so important I've written a little story about it:

Daniel in the Lions' Den

So, let’s meet some of these third person singulars:

Your brother

His girlfriend

The man next door

Manchester United

The Eiffel Tower

The disciplinary committee of FIFA

My watch

Bangkok (and any other city or singular place)

Her latest boyfriend

The government of Lithuania

The municipal authority of Hamburg

The Tennessee Valley Water Authority

His ambition to win the lottery

Your cat

The biggest prize ever won on a Las Vegas slot machine

The first prize in a five thousand metre race

The capital of Italy

A horse

A bit of chewing gum stuck under your seat

Last year

Next week

and so on, and on.....

By the way - have your read our article A Tale of Two Cities?

And please see: The Oral Interview in English