PSAT Glitch

Peter A. McGraw pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU
Wed May 21 16:38:10 UTC 2003


--On Wednesday, May 21, 2003 9:17 AM -0700 Arnold Zwicky
<zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:

> 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."

I find this one truly ambiguous, since "their" could refer to either the
politicians or the citizens.  Even if the "rule" under discussion existed
in my internal grammar, the ambiguity would still exist, since "their" is
possessive.  (Or would the alleged rule allow a possessive pronoun to refer
ONLY to a possessive NP?)

Peter Mc.



*****************************************************************
Peter A. McGraw       Linfield College        McMinnville, Oregon
******************* pmcgraw at linfield.edu ************************



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