open letter to Andrea Lunsford 1

[Arnold Zwicky]

[the original was too long for this list, so i've split it
into three parts.]


a (distressingly long) open letter to you about possessive
antecedents for personal pronouns, with special reference to
Lunsford & Connors:

----------------------

>>From the editorial page of the 6/3/03 New York Times...
  In the first (of two) editorials, "The Abusive Detentions of
    Sept. 11":
        Detention centers routinely blocked efforts by detainees'
        families and lawyers to locate them.
  In the second, "A New Twist at Lincoln Center":
        After all, Carnegie Hall was the Philharmonic's home from
        1891 to 1962, when it moved to what was then called
        Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center.

Dear Andrea,

        No doubt you've been following the flap over the PSAT question
concerning "Toni Morrison's genius enables her to...", which contains
a possessive antecedent for a pronoun, which is said by some to
violate a "rule" of English.  I've been investigating the facts of
actual English usage here (in particular, the usage of careful
professional writers of formal standard English), the details of the
Possessive Antecedent Proscription (PAP, for short) as various
handbooks of English grammar and usage formulate it, the
justifications that these manuals provide for PAP, and the history of
PAP as an explicit "rule" of English.  I'm not finished with all of
these tasks, but here's a progress report.

        To start with, the PAP is pap.  Careful professional writers
of formal standard English simply do not avoid possessive antecedents
for pronouns.  Examples like the ones above occur routinely in the New
York Times, the New Yorker, carefully edited academic writing, and
carefully crafted non-academic writing, fiction and non-fiction alike.
In fact, I believe that similar examples could be found in the
published writing of pretty much anyone who's espoused some version of
the PAP (I'm inclined to think that no one can monitor their writing
so carefully that they'll avoid this very useful construction), though
I'm not about to undertake the hunt.  But here's one from Lunsford &
Connors (4th ed.), p. 29:
         ...all create sensations of speed and urgency in readers'
         minds, making them expect to be able to process and respond
         to messages quickly."

        Now, I find this sentence impeccable, but it does violate the
"convention" for "maintaining clear pronoun references" on p. 216 of
this very same (widely used and generally excellent) manual:

PAP, C&L version:
        Though an adjective or possessive may clearly imply a noun
        antecedent, it does not serve as a clear antecedent.

        For reference below, I'm going to distill the core of
virtually all the proscriptions in handbooks and manuals.  Particular
handbooks bar more types of possessive antecedents than this version
does, or lump possessive antecedents in with other types of "unclear"
antecedents, but almost everyone who just gives a prohibition provides
one that covers all of these cases.  (Jacques Barzun gives a version that
applies only to possessive *proper names*, but that's just bizarre.)
For what it's worth, my version below is more carefully phrased than
*any* I've seen; the published versions all have one or more points of
unclarity in them, a grave defect in a manual of grammar and usage.

PAP, core version:
        A non-pronominal prenominal possessive cannot serve as an
        antecedent for a following non-possessive personal pronoun.

This version bars the New York Times examples above, the now-famous
Toni Morrison sentence, and the example from C&L.  Paradigm examples
of the proscription are the following (which I'll call Mary's-father
examples):
        Mary's father admires her.
        Mary's father thinks she is very intelligent.
        Mary's astute judgment made her famous.

        Such sentences would have to be "fixed" or "corrected", by
repeating the NP from the possessive; using an alternative definite,
but non-pronominal, anaphor; shifting from (backward) anaphora to
cataphora; or using a postnominal possessive with "of".  For the first
of the Mary's-father examples:
        Mary's father admires Mary.
        Mary's father admires the young woman.
        Her father admires Mary.
        The father of Mary admires her.
All of these involve "marked" constructions, which require some
support in the discourse context or in the rhetorical purposes of the
writer; the last is just grotesque.  Without such support, they are
clearly inferior to the original wording, which is quite simply the
unmarked and natural way of conveying the meaning:
        Mary's father admires her.
(But everybody's version, Barzun's included, prohibits this.)