Discussion Groups / English Usage / May 2009

My instinct is to make "relationship" plural, when "relationships among
the four aspects of stakeholder theory" reads quite naturally.

I'm not sure if it's logically possible that there be only one
relationship among the four of them. The diagram will tell.

And OED includes these definitions:

7. Used in reference to any objective relation uniting two (or more)
parties, and holding them in a certain connexion.

10. Expressing reciprocal action or relation maintained, by two (or more)
agents towards each other.

  12. Expressing confinement or restriction to two (or more) parties;
especially used of privacy or secrecy in conversation. between ourselves: as
a matter not to be communicated to others.

13. By the joint action of, done by, shared in by, belonging to (two
parties) jointly. (Sometimes said of more than two, when it is desired to
mark the participation of all the parties more defintely than can be done by
among; cf. 19.)

 V. 19. In all senses, between has been, from its earliest appearance,
extended to more than two. In OE. and ME. it was so extended in sense 1, in
which among is now considered better. It is still the only word available to
express the relation of a thing to many surrounding things severally and
individually, among expressing a relation to them collectively and vaguely:
we should not say 'the space lying among the three points,' or 'a treaty
among three powers,' or 'the choice lies among the three candidates in the
select list,' or 'to insert a needle among the closed petals of a flower.'

"And stop calling me Harvey!"

I had been thinking of a menage a quatre (add your own accents, please)
rather like that of Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and Ralph and
Frances Partridge, where the relationships among them must have been
plural. But clearly one can speak of the relationship (singular) between
fluorine, chlorine, bromine and iodine, if it's that kind of
relationship one means.