and still they come (was Re: PSAT Glitch)

[Arnold Zwicky]

one last set of examples.  john baker wrote me to say i could stop
now, but i tried to point out to him that i was not just piling crap
on prescriptivists (i said this more gently), but was trying to make a
serious point.  examples of the sort i've been collecting are viewed
by most people - ordinary people, and linguists too - as just
unremarkably fine, despite the fact that you can construct some that
are pretty wonky.  meanwhile, examples of the sort i've been
collecting are just banned by the "rules" in some usage/grammar
manuals - as unacceptable, uninterpretable, slovenly, etc., period.

so there's something going on here, something we can try to figure out
by comparing examples from elite writing with the horrors from the
manuals.  so far as i know, no one has done this.  (i would very much
like to hear about previous literature; i'd prefer not to invent the
wheel, once again.)  meanwhile, to the corpora!

still, i understand this is boring almost everyone by now, so i won't
do it any more.  after this.  just one more hit, ok?  (now to teach
myself not to look for examples in everything i read.)

so i was reading the new (5/26/03) New Yorker.  we start with a letter
from Drucilla K. Barker (p. 6), an economics professor at Hollins;
this is a possessive NP linked with a possessive pronoun, so not
within the scope of some people's proscriptions:

 "Bush's irresponsible tax cits, combined with his costly overseas
  aspirations..."

then we go on to hendrik hertzberg's lead Talk of the Town piece,
which is rich in possessive antecedents [it would be an interesting
research project to consider whether certain kinds of subject-matter
promote possessive antecedents, or whether particular writers prefer
them]:

 "...the better to fool his magazine's editors and its fact checker,
  Victoria..." (p. 35)

[possessive-possessive linking]

 "...the _Times's_ circulation has been growing; it now stands at
  well over a million, half of which is accounted for by its national
  edition." (p. 35)

[possessive-possessive linking. note that even the intervening "it"
linked to "circulation" doesn't prevent the later "it" from linking
to the earlier "the _Times_".]

 "The paper's overseas subsidiary, the _International Herald Tribune_,
  and its excellent Web site give it a global reach." (p. 35)

[*all* of this is "about" the New York Times.  note that in context,
the "its" and the "it" refer to the paper (i.e., the NYT) and not to
its subsidiary (the IHT).  this effect has to do with information
structure, not syntactic structure.]

 "Perhaps the most consequential of Blair's fabulisms came in a
  story last October about the Washington-area sniper case, in which
  he asserted that a federal prosecutor..." (p. 36)

[it's about blair.  "Blair" is in a main clause.  the pronoun
"he" is in a subordinate adverbial.]

  "The _Post's_ catharsis, like the _Times's_ twenty-two years
   later, reflected its particular journalistic style to the point of
   stereotype." (p. 36)

[possessive-possessive, but otherwise an especially straightforward
example.  the intrusion of the topically irrelevant "the _Times_"
in between "the _Post_" and "it" is really nice.]

 " "Estrada's views on Roe are very unclear to me," Senator Durbin
  said.  "He doesn't have a treasure trove of legal writings to refer
  to..." " (p. 46, in an Advice and Dissent piece by jeffrey toobin)

[possessive-nominative, and utterly clear, unless you want to exclude
speech, or u.s. senators as sources.  both might be viewed as
"slovenly", i realize.]

ok.  no more.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)