no fun with pronouns

[Neal Whitman]

The journalistic squeezing in of additional information in the wrong place
gave me trouble in interpreting an anaphoric relation in this sentence:

"Dillinger's sometimes hands out fliers at Broad and High streets reminding
people [that] the restaurant on the 16th floor of the LeVeque Tower has a
patio just for smokers."

Dillinger's and the restaurant on the 16th floor are the same entity.
Instead of just saying "it", the writer tried to use a more elaborate
anaphoric device that didn't work.
http://literalminded.wordpress.com/2005/08/01/anaphoric-epithets-gone-wrong/

Neal

----- Original Message -----
From: "Arnold Zwicky" <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, December 09, 2010 11:28 AM
Subject: Re: no fun with pronouns


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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: no fun with pronouns
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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