Identify the erroneous part of the following English sentence: Each of the…
2026
Identify the erroneous part of the following English sentence: Each of the participants / have submitted / their report / before the deadline.
Answer: B. have submitted — ConceptIn subject–verb agreement, the verb agrees with the grammatical head of the subject, not with a nearby noun inside an ‘of’ phrase. Distributive words…
- A.
Each of the participants
- B.
have submitted
- C.
their report
- D.
before the deadline
Attempted by 29 students.
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: B
Concept
In subject–verb agreement, the verb agrees with the grammatical head of the subject, not with a nearby noun inside an ‘of’ phrase.
Distributive words such as ‘each’ are grammatically singular, so they take a singular verb form.
Application
In ‘Each of the participants’, the head is ‘each’; ‘participants’ belongs to the intervening prepositional phrase. Therefore the present-perfect auxiliary must be ‘has’, giving ‘Each of the participants has submitted their report before the deadline.’
Contrast
‘Each of the participants’ is the subject phrase; ‘each’ controls agreement.
‘have submitted’ is the verb phrase; ‘have’ must change to ‘has’ for the singular head.
‘their report’ is acceptable with singular ‘they’ as a gender-neutral possessive in modern English.
‘before the deadline’ is a correctly formed time phrase.
Cross-check
Remove the intervening phrase ‘of the participants’: ‘Each has submitted’ remains grammatical, whereas ‘Each have submitted’ does not.
Result
The erroneous segment is ‘have submitted’; it should be ‘has submitted’.