PSAT Glitch

[Arnold Zwicky]

[a reminder about what i'm doing here.  i'm collecting a few examples
of anaphors with possessive antecedents, in each day's New York Times.
so far i've restricted myself to the editorial pages, the obituaries,
and the front-page stories that i read all the way through.  i'm *not*
doing a systematic search of the Times, even just the first section.
after i find an example or two, i try to stop collecting, so that i
can read/skim for content only.  i assume that there are a *lot* more
examples than the ones i find.  no doubt the sports section, which i
don't read at all, contains a fair number of examples like "The
Braves' star pitcher led them to victory last night."]

today's gleanings are all from a single front-page story, headlined
  States Are Relaxing
  Standards on Tests
  To Avoid Sanctions

first, a straightforward case of "it" with a possessive antecedent:

 "Four United States senators are backing a bill that would allow
  states to obtain waivers from the law's requirements, and
  legislators in Minnesota, New Hampshire and Hawaii are considering
  proposals for those states to opt out of it."

then, two anaphoric instances of the adverb "there" - not a personal
pronoun, maybe not a pronoun at all (depending on how you assign
syntactic categories), but certainly an anaphor in these examples,
which means that it should fall under the "implicitness" justification
for the proscription against possessive antecedents.

 "Michigan's standards had been among the nation's highest, which
  caused problems last year when 1,513 schools there were labeled
  under law as needing improvement..."

[note that there are two potential antecedents for "there", "the
nation" and "Michigan", both in possessives, with "the nation" being
closer to the "there".  nevertheless, there's no problem with
"Michigan" as the antecedent, both because that makes more sense and,
more important, because the discourse referent Michigan is way more
foregrounded than the discourse referent the nation.]

 "Texas's plans for compliance with the law are of special interest
  because Mr. Bush drew heavily on his record of raising test scores
  there to sell the federal law to Congress."

the status of discourse referents in information structure is pretty
clearly important in all three of these passages, which are in some
sense "about" the law, Michigan, and Texas, respectively.  something
very similar is going on in (some) examples of what would technically
be classified as "dangling modifiers" but seem utterly unproblematic,
since the discourse referent that has no linguistic expression in the
modifier is highly topical, and can therefore link to a possessive
(with a bland head noun) or an object (with a bland verb) in the
following clause, as in

  As a linguist, Zwicky's interest in possessive antecedents...
  As a linguist, what struck me about his work in philosophy...

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)