PSAT Glitch

[Arnold Zwicky]

P2052 at aol.com:
 >I can remember a rule from traditional grammar, which stated that
 >pronouns replace nouns, which, are, generally, in the
 >nominative/accusative/dative case. Possessive words, including nouns
 >that end in apostrophe s, are in the genitive case. Thus, according
 >to traditional grammar, the sentence is incorrect since "Toni
 >Morrison's" is genitive and clearly not a candidate for antecedent
 >of the pronoun, "her." The problem, however, is that neither is the
 >subject, "genius," which, in this context, does not share the
 >semantic features of "her", which are [+human, +animate,
 >+feminine]. Rather, "genius" (in this context) is referring to the
 >"outstanding talent," "exceptional ability," or "intellectual or
 >creative achievements," all characteristics, or skills.

 >This rigid traditional definition works for sentences such as the
 >following (borrowed from an exercise on pronouns): "Our neighbor's
 >lawnmower is very noisy. This makes sleeping late impossible on
 >Sunday mornings, when he mows." In this example, "[t]his" refers to
 >the noise; however, there is no explicit noun, "noise," only the
 >predicate adjective, "noisy."

a couple of quick comments.

first, i always bridle at the word "rule" in these discussions, when
the correct term would be "proscription" (which is usually accompanied
by a prescription about what should do instead of the proscribed act).
"rule" suggests some disembodied rule-making authority, while
"proscription" at least calls some some individual proscribing agent,
some person who says "don't say that!"  the more we talk about these
matters in terms of the specific people who are proposing to tell us
what to do, the better.  "rule" is a loaded word in this context.

second, i also bridle at loose references to "traditional grammar", as
if this names some relatively uniform entity, which is moreover,
representative of (unmodified, unqualified) "tradition".  who
represents this tradition, and how did they get elevated to be the
bearers of something called a "tradition"?  "tradition" is a loaded
word, too.

third, on the other hand, this posting finally lets me see how someone
might have reasoned their way to the (i think) absurd position that
english possessive NPs should not serve as antecedents for pronouns
(other than, i suppose, possessive pronouns: "Toni Morrison's writings
made her famous" would be out, but "Toni Morrison's writings spread
her fame around the world" would be ok).  the idea is that pronouns
with possessive antecedents would be violations of the "anaphoric
island" restrictions, which (with large numbers of exceptions) bar
pronoun reference back to a part of a derived word (*"a serious
flautist practices on it every day").

the claim would be that english NP's expressions are derived, not
inflected, words (so that my earlier discussion of pronouns agreeing
in case with their antecedents would be quite beside the point).
there are problems with this, starting from the fact that, in general,
english NP's expressions are not words but phrases (with the 's as a
suffix, of some sort, on the last word of the phrase - what i've
called "phrasal inflection").  then there is the fact that the 's
interacts with indisputable inflectional morphology on this last word
(yielding what i've called "suppressing the Zs", most obviously in
possessive plurals like "the students' problems" rather than "the
students's problems", but also in more complex and interesting cases),
which suggests very strongly that it is itself inflectional.

finally, there's the problem that the anaphoric-island effect is
known to be variable rather than absolute.  in particular, when it's
very easy for the hearer/reader to reconstruct the antecedent,
anaphoric islands seem not to be treated as problematic.

the larger point here is that linguists have thought about these
issues, and have had a lot to say about them.  these are things to be
reasoned through from the facts of the language (by which i mean
actual language use).

well, there's the even larger point that the practice of the best
writers and editors in english, not to mention ordinary folks, seems
not to accord with the proscription in question, which should indicate
that appealing to anaphoric-island restrictions for this construction
is seriously wrong-headed.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)