no fun with pronouns

[Charles C Doyle]

I certainly have no objection to anyone's posting what they have posted.  However, like Ron, I don't see any problem about comprehending the statement!

Maybe the cold weather is making northerners less nimble in their interpretive abilities . . . .

--Charlie

________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Victor Steinbok [aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM]
Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2010 1:53 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The context, if you wish to explore it further, was provided in the link
and in the brief description I gave when I posted the sentence. The
article is a discussion of Assange's surrender and arrest (I believe, I
misspelled his name initially). And it is Assange who is hiding between
the pronouns and the extended complement. For the record, I don't think
there is anything syntactically wrong with the sentence, but I disagree
with Ron's assessment that "there is nothing remarkable or noteworthy
whatever" going on in it--in fact, the very notion that there is
/nothing/ wrong with this sentence is what I already find remarkable. I
posted it ostensibly for the files of people who research and teach
syntax and ferreting them out by name was not a task I was willing to
undertake to comply with Ron's notion of what should and should not be
posted. I found it to be of general interest as well and not the kind of
one-off example of misuse that Ron usually rants against. Nor is this a
stylistic complaint. I thought the issue was rather obvious, which is
why I left rather terse commentary.

     VS-)

On 12/7/2010 1:19 PM, Ronald Butters wrote:
> Where is the "pronominal confusion"? There are only two pronouns, both =
> of which refer to some person who was mentioned in context that Victor =
> does not give. Even "the man who has angered Washington" is clearly a =
> deictic reference to the same person. There is nothing remarkable or =
> noteworthy whatever about the sentence (except that we are not given the =
> immediately preceding context). f

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