Recently, a colleague created a warm up question:
How many people are in your family?
And the model answer was:
I have 4 people in my family; my mother, my father, and my 2 brothers.
While this is not incorrect, some of my students as well as myself thought this was odd to exclude the person giving the answer in the final tally. It seems to me that it would be more common and preferable to say:
I have 5 people in my family; my mother, my father and my 2 brothers.
It should be obvious to everyone that the person answering the question about his family would include himself in the total count.
What I would like to know is how native English speakers would respond to the question when you have your father, mother and 2 brothers.
Best Answer
No: there is a difference between I have and There are.
I have excludes the person doing the having. This may be a convention, but it can be rationalised by considering that one does not have oneself: one can only have something else. There are is an "external" count and so will include everyone.
The word other can be inserted in both, which removes any possible ambiguity from the first, and alters the scope of the second, by deliberately excluding the speaker: