PSAT Glitch

[Arnold Zwicky]

still working on the history of this proscription.  here's geoff
nunberg's first stab at it, in mail to the stanford linguistics
department:
 >PS As best I can tell, this rule was popularized if not originated
 >by Wilson Follett's 1966 Modern American Usage. In the article on
 >"antecedents," Follett says (I've used quotation marks in place of
 >his italics):

 >A noun in the possessive case, being functionally an adjective, is
 >seldom a competent antecedent of a pronoun: "On F's arrival from
 >Virginia at La Guardia Airport last night, he denied to reporters
 >that..." "F." would legitimately lead to "he"; "F's" cannot.
 >Reconstruct, then: "F, on his arrival, denied..." (Of course a
 >possessive noun can be the antecedent of a possessive -- i.e., an
 >adjectival--pronoun: "F's denial was made on his arrival.")

 >The rule is repeated in Jacques Barzun's 1985 Simple and Direct and
 >John Simon's 1980 Paradigms Lost.

follett's account looks to me like an anaphoric-islands rationale,
complete with the exemption for anaphoric possessive pronouns.

can some of the people who cite this "rule" from "traditional grammar"
provide some actual citations, along these lines?

i'm about to go search through my collection of manuals.  there's a
sweetly sentimental aspect to this, since one of those manuals is my
dad's freshman composition handbook, which he passed on to me when i
went off to college (at princeton, to major in mathematics, with a
fabulous scholarship from General Motors).  it was the only textbook
he saved from his college days.  he was the first in the family (and
the only one, in those Great Depression days) to go to college.  penn
state, and even then on a football scholarship (i have impeccable
working-class credentials on both sides), and majoring in dairy
husbandry, though his dream, utterly unrealized, was to major in
english and become a writer.  he was very proud that i became a writer
- a newspaper reporter, and then a much-published scholar, and
sometimes a poet too.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), trying to honor his dad