Bill,
This prohibition has a curious hold on particularly inflexible
prescriptivists. The issue arose initially because of a news story
about a high school student who had identified a possessive antecedent
as an error on an SAT exam when ETS had another error in mind. The
student and his teacher protested, cited handbooks, and got the decision
reversed, so that the possessive antecedent was also considered in
error. The student and his teacher wanted all other answers on that SAT
marked wrong, but I don't think that happened. As Zwicky notes, this
prohibition is stated frequently with some vehemence and is regarded as
important, but for what reasons remains baffling.
Herb
Subject: Re: Syntax question
I was unaware of the previous dialog on the topic, but was a bit curious
about the prohibition, and took the liberty of doing a search in the LOB
Corpus (a large collection of text files of British English). Out of
thirty instances of sentence-initial "In his..." constructions, thirteen
involved a cataphoric relation between "his" and a following NP. The
majority of those thirteen, interestingly, were of the same type as the
one under discussion -- they identified a publication in which the
referent said something.
Thanks for the reference, Herb! This is the kind of think I like to
point students to in classes like History of English and Pedagogic
Grammar.
Bill Spruiell
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stahlke, Herbert F.W.
Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2005 3:19 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Syntax question
The rule prohibiting possessives as antecedents started appearing in
handbooks and public discussion about 60 or 70 years ago and was not a
part of what was taught as English grammar before that. There was an
extensive discussion of the Possessive Antecedent Prohibition on the
American Dialect Society list, culminating in a longish and excellent
analysis by Arnold Zwicky. You can find a summary of the analysis at
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~zwicky/adshand.pdf
This is a good example of a rule of grammar that isn't, one that is very
recent in its inception but has made it into handbooks and even the SAT,
even though some of the best writers violate regularly.
Herb
I think the 2nd sounds clearer because the pronoun 'he' of the first one
should not refer back to an adjective (Hrothgar's), not to mention that
leaves "Beowulf" as the antecedent for "he".
____________________________
Larry Beason, Associate Professor
Director of Composition
University of South Alabama
Mobile, AL 36688-0002
251-460-7861
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