Kirsten,

We had a discussion a few months ago about the Possessive Antecedent Prohibition.  There is solid evidence that the putative rule disallowing the Toni Morrison sentence did not exist before the 1940s and is and has been consistently violated by the best of English writers before and since.  Even grammarians and language mavens who espouse this rule violate it regularly in their own writings about it.  The rule is one of the myths of modern English.  There is nothing whatsoever wrong with the Toni Morrison example.

Herb



"When I was about ten years old, I vehemently swore that I did not spit
watermelon juice and seeds into the open passenger-side window of my *intensely
cruel and unusually nasty* neighbor's shitty car."
 I've heard the rule that a possessive cannot be a pronoun's antecedent (**Toni
Morrison*'s genius enables *her* to...). Is it also true that an adjective
phrase cannot modify a possessive? Here, the ambiguity is whether the
adjective phrase "intensely cruel and unusually nasty" modifies the
possessive "neighbor's" or the noun "car" that the possessive itself
modifies. Would this error be called a dangling modifier? Can you think of
an example of an adjective phrase unambiguously modifying a possessive?
 Thanks, Kirsten

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