no fun with pronouns

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Dec 9, 2010, at 6:07 AM, Barbara Need wrote:

> As a some-time composition instructor, even with a fuller context, I
> would have marked this example as a problem.

as would i.  given the previous context, which establishes that the article is about Julian Assange, the pronouns "his" and "him" present no problem; they'll be understood as referring to Assange. If the sentence had stopped there, with no new NP referring to Assange, all would be fine.  in the context, this version would be abolutely unproblematic:

(1) His lawyer had earlier arranged to deliver him to British police for questioning in a sex-crimes investigation.

so would a wordier version with a third pronoun that makes it explicit that Assange was being investigated, rather than leaving this bit of information to be inferred by the reader:

(2) His lawyer had earlier arranged to deliver him to British police for questioning in a sex-crimes investigation of him.

but instead the writer chose to introduce new information (that Assange had angered Washington by leaking diplomatic correspondence), in a relative clause, producing a *redescription* of Assange that shifts the topic from sex crimes to Wikileaking:

(3) the man who has angered Washington by spilling thousands of government secrets on the Internet

this could have been managed by treating the new information as  the parenthetical digression that it is, by following (1) or (2) with:

(4) (He/Assange has angered Washington by spilling thousands of government secrets on the Internet.)

packing the information into a relative clause makes the reader have to work it out that this is not a new referent, but a redescription of Assange. some readers -- like Barbara Need and me -- will get hung up briefly at that point, while others won't.  a considerate writer should probably  anticipate this possibility and re-word the text for easier processing.

even using the name "Assange" can hang things up for some readers:

(2') His lawyer had earlier arranged to deliver him to British police for questioning in a sex-crimes investigation of Assange.

the problem here is that a proper name (rather than a pronoun) would ordinarily be used for a referent of low topicality at the current point in the discourse -- to reintroduce the referent.  but Assange is highly topical at this point, so that the proper name "Assange" would be something of a puzzle.  (this discussion is about these sentences in their original context.  of course, considering (2') in isolation, with no context, the pronouns "his" and "him" look cataphoric and take processing work.)

arnold

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