I received an excellent question on our Facebook page recently. Instead of answering right away, I threw it out for discussion and received an unexpected number of replies — with much disagreement among them. So, I thought I’d take a moment on the blog here to give my perspective.

Here’s the question:

Which of the following is correct: “They balance a basket on their heads” or “They balance a basket on their head”? And can you please explain the correct answer?

I found it curious how confident my Facebook friends were in answering the question, yet they were unable to point to the grammatical principle upon which they based their answers. And the answers differed widely.

What’s frustrating about this question is that I don’t know what to call this problem¹. It’s not pronoun agreement because possessive pronouns agree with their antecedents, not with the words they modify. And because I don’t know what to call it, I don’t know how to research it. So the following is simply my unsubstantiated perspective.

It’s about Clarity, Not Grammar

There’s nothing grammatically wrong with either option suggested by the questioner. And there are other options too. Here are the basic ones:

1. They balance a basket on their heads.
2. They balance a basket on their head.
3. They balance baskets on their heads.
4. They balance baskets on their head.

Let me repeat. All of these options are grammatically fine. No errors in agreement or possession exist in any of the four. The question, therefore, isn’t which is correct, but which most clearly expresses the intended meaning. And we don’t have enough information to know for sure what the intended meaning is, so we’ll have to guess.

• We know the subject of the sentence is plural (they), so we are speaking about more than one basket-balancer.
• We don’t know if there is one basket or more than one. Both of the sentences in the original question refer to “a basket,” but I suspect she meant that each of the people were carrying a single basket, and therefore, there are a number of baskets in total. Let’s assume that.
• It’s possible that each person is balancing more than one basket on his or her head, but let’s assume there’s only one.
• We can also assume that these are anatomically normal people — that they have precisely one head each. 🙂

So, we want to communicate that there is a group of people each balancing a single basket on his or her head. Let’s look at the four options previously mentioned.

• They balance a basket on their heads.

This works, but the image that first came to my mind was of a group of people balancing a single large basket on their collective heads. The sentence is therefore ambiguous — it can be misinterpreted.

• They balance a basket on their head.

This one can also be understood as intended, but there’s something funny to me about saying “their head” — as though they all share a single head. Common sense is enough to eliminate this possibility, of course.

• They balance baskets on their heads.

This one can also be correctly understood, but by making baskets plural, it can also be read as though each person has several baskets on his or her head.

• They balance baskets on their head.

Also potentially correct, but this might also describe multiple baskets on a single, shared head. Which is weird, of course.

So, what am I saying? None of these are okay? All of them? Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying. This is an odd semantic situation where it is impossible to entirely avoid ambiguity. English just isn’t perfectly clear in situations like this. All you can do is choose the phrasing that is least likely to be misunderstood. There is no right or wrong.

Personally, I don’t worry about people thinking the group shares one head or that each of them has more than one head. That’s just silly. I’d be concerned that the ratio of baskets to head be as clear as possible. For me, that means I prefer “They balance a basket on their heads.”

But since we are not really limited to these options, I think we can do even better by inserting the word each:

• They each balance a basket on their heads.

The singular head would be okay too, since each has a single head, but there are collectively several heads, so I prefer the plural “heads.” Either way.

This is a real stumper, huh? What do you think? How would you express this idea in a single sentence?

Oh, and if anyone knows of a name for this semantic situation, I’d love to learn it.

 

¹ Since writing this article, I have learned that the subject is known as subject-complement agreement. (Thanks, Mirel.)

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