open letter to andrea lunsford 3

[Baker, John]

        From Chapter 11 of Pride and Prejudice (Bartleby edition):

        >>Miss Bingley's attention was quite as much engaged in watching Mr. Darcy's progress through _his_ book, as in reading her own; and she was perpetually either making some inquiry, or looking at his page. She could not win him, however, to any conversation; he merely answered her question and read on. <<

        Not as elegant an example as the ones from the Bible and Shakespeare, but better than the ones from Strunk and the Fowlers.  I don't have a copy of Follett, but I'm sure that he violates the PAP too.

John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: Arnold Zwicky [mailto:zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU]
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2003 12:40 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: open letter to andrea lunsford 3



P.S.  I see I've failed to provide an example of a possessive
antecedent for a personal pronoun from the works of Jane Austen, who
serves linguists as a sort of gold standard for elite writing; if it's
in Austen, you can pretty much bet it's standard English.  I'm sure
there are examples, but I'll leave it as an exercise for other readers
of this letter to find them.