more on possessive antecedents

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

fans of the possessive antecedents discussion might want to look at two
recent postings by me to the group blog at www.languagelog.com.
there's one from 21 october on the idea that sentences like "Einstein's
discoveries made him famous" are ungrammatical in isolation, but ok if
there's an antecedent for the pronoun earlier in the context.  and one
from today about a prediction of this proposal, that there are no
first-mention possessive antecedents (or, at least, that The New Yorker
doesn't permit such things).

both postings have real data in them, and least some linguistics,
though the ratio of ridicule to linguistics is considerably higher in
the second than in the first.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), who decided against posting in
multiple places