Actually, it was a PAP example on a 2003 PSAT that occasioned the whole ADS-L discussion. The PSAT test item began, "Toni Morrison's genius enables her to..." If I remember the story correctly, the grammatical error the PSAT was looking for was not reference to a possessive noun but something else. A high school student in Florida identified the problem as a possessive antecedent error and had the question marked wrong. He and his teacher protested to ETS and succeeded not only in getting the student’s answer marked correct but all of the other answers marked wrong. The story made national news.
In the example you provide below, I find choice A by far the best.
Herb
From: Assembly for the
Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Susan
van Druten
Sent: 2009-05-27 22:22
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Sentences beginning with conjunctions
Also, the PAP is an error of confusion when it occurs in
parallel structure as in this SAT test question:
Unlike
her sister Heather, who would always put spiders safely outside if she found
them in the house, Joanne’s fear kept her from going anywhere near the
creatures.
A. Joanne’s
fear kept her from going anywhere near the creatures
B. Joanne’s
fear is what kept her from going anywhere near the creatures
C. fear
is why Joanne had not gone anywhere near them
D. Joanne
was too afraid to go anywhere near the creatures
E. they
scared Joanne too much to go anywhere near them
On May 27, 2009, at 8:30 PM, STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:
This supposed error is an instance of what Arnold Zwicky has
called the Possessive Antecedent Proscription (PAP) (see http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0306B&L=ADS-L&P=R3281&I=-3
and other articles in that thread for extensive discussion on the American
Dialect Society List (ADS-L)). PAP is found in a fair number of handbooks
now, and it was mentioned in some 18th c. language advice books. It
doesn’t appear in a modern handbook till 1941, so it is for all practical
purposes a fairly recent invention. The problem is not that one cannot
have a pronoun refer to a preceding possessive noun but that one should avoid
doing so if ambiguity would result. In “Mary’s father sent
her to Radcliffe,” there is no problem of reference, and many careful
writers have written such sentences. In “Mary’s mother paid
her tuition,” it’s not entirely clear whose tuition was paid, and
the sentence should be revised. The problem is not the possessive noun as
antecedent but the ambiguity that results from having a possessive noun and a
head noun both of which are female. The PAP is another instance of a
grammatical proscription, like “Don’t start sentences with
‘Because’” or “Don’t end sentences with a
preposition,” that represents the sort of teaching shortcut participants
in this thread have expressed concern about. A small side note:
“Jamie’” is not an adjective. Possessive constructions
behave like determiners, which puts them in a category with
“the.” I’m aware that some definitions of parts of
speech for English do not separate adjectives from determiners, but most
grammarians have rejected such a conflation of categories.
Herb
From: Assembly
for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jordan Earl
Sent: 2009-05-27 20:03
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Sentences
beginning with conjunctions
Can I throw in a question here? The revised version
seems to me to create a new problem... we have only one sentence with
a varying start now, and in it, the subject is a pronoun referring back
to an adjective in the previous sentence. I realize that this
phenomenon is acceptable in spoken speech and probably happens a lot in
writing, but I'm wondering if others out there teaching would point this out
to students or let it go...
It seems to me that *she* would work well
if Landon were female; alternately, one might begin the second
sentence with *Jamie* and solve the problem, as the 2nd *she* would then
be clear. Curious what others think -- --Jordan |
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