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 To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/