Learn English – Using relative pronoun “who” with “team” or “bunch”

grammaticalityrelative-clausesrelative-pronounswhich-whowho-that

I would like to know if this sentence is grammatical, with its usage of the relative pronoun who.

(I) Our team is a happy bunch who works night and day.

I am getting two parses for this sentence:

(II) Our team is [a happy bunch who works night and day].

(III) Our team [is a happy bunch] who works night and day.

(for sentence (III), the relative clause who works night and day is modifying our team).

I am not sure if the usage of who is correct in either parse or the original sentence. For what it is worth, the sentence was written by a non-native speaker. Please advise.

Note this issue does not appear to be trivial. See this discussion as well: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2935603.

Best Answer

"Who" sounds wrong to my native ear. I would prefer "which" or "that," since a team is an inanimate object (composed of people, true, but still not a person itself). In my own writing, I often overuse "that," so I would probably write "which," giving us this sentence:

Our team is a happy bunch which works night and day.

(Some prescriptivists may tell you not to use "which" here because we're using a restrictive clause rather than a nonrestrictive clause, but Merriam-Webster says "which" is fine here.)

A British speaker might prefer to treat the team as plural:

Our team is a happy bunch which work night and day.

I am uncertain if the British usage still prefers "which"; the plural here is unfamiliar to me and I cannot intuit whether to switch back to "who." Multiple people in the comments have indicated that switching is correct, because we're now talking about multiple people. So for BrE, you end up with this:

Our team is a happy bunch who work night and day.

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