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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