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]