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
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