Let's consider the following example taken from C# Pocket Reference by Joseph Albahari.
Statements in C# execute sequentially and are terminated by a semicolon.
Why is the semicolon in singular form while there are some C# statements in the context? In my thinking, there must be one to one correspondence between a statement and a semicolon, so the semicolon must be in plural form. But if we do like this, the meaning becomes unclear if there is no code snippet provided.
Another example for those who does not know C#:
Visitors who come to my office must bring a cup to drink.
The speaker wants to say each visitor must bring one and only one cup; no more than one cup is allowed for a single visitor. But, one might think there is only one cup used in rotation among all visitors.
If we rephrase like the following,
Visitors who come to my office must bring cups to drink.
then the speaker's intent might be unclear as well.
So, how does one handle this kind of problem?
Best Answer
You've run afoul of the Plural Generic Noun Phrase, which is one of the variants of Generic reference in English.
It would be possible and allowable to use semicolons instead of a semicolon; but probably the singular is preferable because there is precisely one semicolon per statement, at precisely the same place in each case.
However, a better strategy would be to use the Indefinite Generic Noun Phrase a statement in C#, which is generic, and distributive, and also singular, so that the example would be
This is better because indefinite generics are used to indicate definitional properties, and that's what's at issue here.