Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN  47306
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________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Gerald Walton [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: December 28, 2009 11:07 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Gerunds and Participles

On the correctness of "We read Faulkner's work and learned that he...,"
the question is one of the status of what's been called the Possessive
Antecedent Prohibition. It turns out that this putative rule of grammar
goes back only a little over six decades. The earliest appearance of it
in a grammar treatise is in the early 1940s, but from that source it
appears to have spread like kudzu and become as certain as the
eighty-year-older prohibition on splitting infinitives. Arnold Zwicky
has done extensive research on the PAP that you can find by googling
either Zwicky or Possessive Antecedent Prohibition. One of many places
to start is
http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2009/10/11/just-in-nyt-violates-pap/.

This is just to you, not the group. I appreciate your calling Zwicky's
work to my attention. I had never known there was a name for the
problem, and I was certainly not aware of the interesting comments by
Zwicky and others.
Happy New Year,
Gerald

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