"The anonymous good Samaritan probably saved Ms. Payne's life, the 46-year
old Fort Thomas woman says, and ended an hour-long, savage attack from an
assailant she had met in a local bar."

One of the reasons that sentence is confusing is that it is an indirect
quotation presented in a way that is normally used for direct quotations.
Since it is an indirect quotation, the phrase "Ms. Payne's life" occurs in
what is technically a dependent clause governed by "the .. woman says
[that]."  In other words, this seems to illustrate the rule that backward
pronominalization is normal in dependent clauses.






On Fri, 11 Aug 2000, Haussamen, Brock wrote:

> An interesting sentence, and very likely hypercorrected as Max speculates.
> I was wondering about another scenario: perhaps originally there had been a
> direct quote involved--"He probably saved my life"--which was changed, "Ms.
> Payne's" replacing "my," without an awareness that the new sentence sounded
> as if it referred to two women.  I am frequently struck by how a seemingly
> routine revision can throw the delicate workings of a sentence unexpectedly
> out of whack.
>
> Brock
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: MAX MORENBERG
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: 8/10/00 5:03 PM
> Subject: Re: Backward pronominalization
>
> Today's CINCINNATI ENQUIRER ran a story about a woman who was beaten and
> abused on a country road in southwest Ohio some weeks ago.  She is now
> recovering and is looking for the driver who, seeing the brutality on
> the
> road,  called the police on his cell phone.  She wants to thank the
> "Samaritan" publicly.
>
> That's all as background for the grammatical issue at hand.  The
> newspaper
> item included the following sentence: "The anonymous good Samaritan
> probably saved Ms. Payne's life, the 46-year old Fort Thomas woman says,
> and ended an hour-long, savage attack from an assailant she had met in a
> local bar."
>
> The sentence seems to me strangely constructed because it has Ms. Payne
> as
> a genitive noun (Ms. Payne's") rather than using "her."  It seems as if
> there are two different women involved. Don't you suppose that the
> reporter
> or copy editor was following a "rule" he/she remembered from somewhere
> that
> said pronouns must follow the nouns they refer to?  But as this thread
> on
> backward pronominalization has indicated, anaphora is a good deal more
> complicated than that.
>
> I thought the sentence was an interesting commentary on our discusssion.
>
> Max
>
> **************************
> Max Morenberg
> Professor
> Department of English
> Miami University
> Oxford, OH 45056
> [log in to unmask]
>