Another Sign of the Apocalypse?
For some time I've been collecting examples of interesting pronominal
anaphora in writing. Some of the examples are inept; the reader
is initially led to entertain an unlikely referent for the pronoun, and
sometimes it is almost impossible to shake the wrong reading; these
examples are akin to the truly inept dangling modifiers that the
Fellowship of the Predicative Adjunct has/have [choose according to
your nationality] been collecting for some time. But other times
there is no problem, given the context and real-world knowledge.
I posted some recent examples to the American Dialect Society mailing
list, concluding the first of these with the observation that
The fact is that huge numbers of
personal pronouns are potentially ambiguous in their reference, but
this is rarely a problem. Which means that handbook advice to
avoid ambiguity of reference for pronouns is remarkably unhelpful; this
is tantamount to telling people to avoid pronouns, period.
Beverly Flanigan now reports that she has students at Ohio University
who were taught just this (in high school, I assume). Surely the
Apocalypse is upon us.
According to Flanigan, on ADS-L 7/18/06:
For the past several years I've had
students who in fact tell me they were taught not to use pronouns in
writing. The result is a constant repetition of nouns where
pronominal substitutions would have been perfectly
comprehensible. Most annoying.
Annoying? It is to weep and gnash one's teeth.
For the record, here's the case I wrote about, from
The New Yorker of 7/10&17/06,
p. 90, in David Denby's review of "The Devil Wears Prada" (pronouns
bold-faced):
A high-minded college journalist who
wants to do serious work, Andy hangs up Miranda's coat and bag every
morning after she flings them
down on Andy's desk; she runs
and fetches, criss-crossing the city, tending to Miranda's dog, her twin daughters, her dry cleaning.
Finding a referent for a pronoun can, in principle, involve checking
out (at least) the following factors: (a) the properties of the
pronoun; (b)
how recently
mentioned possible referents were; (c) whether a possible referent was
mentioned in a position structurally parallel to the one the pronoun is
in; (d) whether a possible referent was mentioned via a NP in a
prominent position in the sentence, especially the subject NP; (e) the
salience/foregrounding/topicality of the referent in the discourse
context; (f) the real-world plausibility of the referent. This is
amazingly complicated stuff, and even small changes in wording can
shift the likelihood of one referent over others, as in the following
set:
Bush invited Putin to his ranch.
[very likely: Bush's ranch]
Bush followed Putin to his office. [Bush's or Putin's office,
depending on the context]
Bush followed Putin to his dacha. [very likely: Putin's dacha]
(Note that sometimes following the Avoid Pronouns "rule" produces truly
bizarre results, like "Bush invited Putin to Bush's ranch.")
Most of the time we sort our way through referent finding without
difficulty, relying heavily on real-world plausibility. I noticed
the Andy/Miranda example only because I'm hypersensitive to pronouns
(on reflection, Geoff Pullum thinks it's not very good writing; but he
didn't notice anything odd the first time through).
Then one that definitely gave me pause, the very beginning of Caroline
Leavitt's "Learning Mother Love" in
Psychology
Today, July/August 2006, p. 44:
It's a shiny bright apple of a day in
San Francisco and the three of us--me, my husband, Jeff, and our
one-year-old son, Max--are at a concert. He's in red corduroy overalls and a
striped shirt, his hair long and golden as the day ahead of us.
The concert's been going on for an hour already, and the whole time Max
has been content to sit on his father's lap, enthralled by the music.
There are several ways to fix this one, but the obvious one is to junk
the pronoun and repeat "Max". Occasionally that's the way to be
clear. Just not
ALWAYS.
Finally two that work just fine, I think, but would go differently if
the surrounding wording were changed:
Soon after his 60th birthday, Beecher
became a celebrity of a far less exalted kind. Theodore Tilton,
his longtime friend and sometime journalistic collaborator, accused the
preacher of committing adultery with his
wife...
(NYT Book Review, 7/16/06, p. 10, Michael Kazin review of a
biography of Henry Ward Beecher)
To see the issue, suppose that instead of "committing adultery..." the
sentence went "committing sodomy...".
Relatives awaiting immigrants from
Eastern Europe in 1893 discover they
died at sea.
(NYT Book Review, 7/16/06, p. 28, iUniverse ad for The Golden Door by Charles B. Nam)
To see the issue, try following "discover they" with "don't know which
port the ship is headed for" rather than "died at sea".
Trying to teach people how to use pronouns skillfully in writing is a
very hard task, as you can see from looking at some examples like
these. But telling them to Avoid Pronouns is certainly not the
way to go.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at July 18, 2006 08:33 PM