PSAT Glitch

[Arnold Zwicky]

today's NYT examples:

1.  first, three examples from the editorial page, all involving
a *possessive* pronoun with a possessive NP antecedent - ok for some
of the handbooks, not for a few of them:

 5/21/03, letter from Jacob Hartog:
"... even in difficult times, politicians can rely on their
citizens' common sense as well as their fantasies and fears."

 5/21/03, editorial, A Weakened Treasury:
"The Bush administration's pursuit of its reckless fiscal policy..."

 same source:
"... there was a considerable stature gap between Mr. Bush's foreign
policy and defense team, on the one hand, and his economic team."

2. a new type, involving a zero anaphor (indicated by "___") where
"it" would also have been possible; this one strikes me as potentially
ambiguous, between "the Met" (the interpretation i got first, but then
i'm scarcely an unbiased observer now) and "the Met's medieval
collection" (what an extension of the handbook rule to anaphors in
general would predict) as antecedents, though the real-world
difference is so slight as to be insignificant:

 5/21/03, obit for william h. forsyth:
"He worked in the Met's medieval collection as a volunteer in 1933
and joined ___ a year later as a full-time assistant."

----------

an invented example in which the possessive antecedent reading would
be forced by context:

 He worked in the Met's basement as a volunteer in 1933
  and joined ___ a year later as a full-time assistant.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)