Words (Specifically Pronouns) Mean Things

March 5, 2009

I read a sentence in Us Weekly that I wanted to blog about, but then I left my magazine behind in a nail salon, so I don’t have the exact text. However, here is a paraphrase of the sentence that set me off:

Jennifer Aniston finally encountered Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie face-to-face, four years after their marriage ended.

734cov-home.jpgEvery pronoun (with a few idiomatic exceptions, such as the “it” in “it’s raining”) must have an antecedent that matches in number, is unambiguous, and is actually stated in the sentence. A good rule is: If the sentence could be read another way due to its pronouns, and you’re using your outside knowledge or making assumptions to know what the sentence means, the sentence is probably grammatically incorrect.

A good example is the sentence, “Mary’s mother told her she should do her homework.” This is wrong, wrong, wrong on two counts. First, “Mary’s” is acting as an adjective — that is, “Mary” herself is not in the sentence, so, while the pronoun “her,” which occurs twice and is possessive, may refer back to the possessive “Mary’s,” the object pronoun “she” may not. (Subject and object pronouns may not refer back to possessives, whereas possessive pronouns have much less strict rules and may refer back to other possessives or to regular nouns).

But what, really, is the problem with “Mary’s mother told her she should do her homework”? We all know what it means, right? Well, sort of. If you said, “Mary’s father told her she should do her homework,” the “she” would still be wrong, but that’s a pretty pedantic point, since the meaning is unambiguous. But in the case of “Mary’s mother told her she should do her homework,” it is possible to read the sentence as “Mary’s mother told Mary that Mary’s mother should do Mary’s mother’s homework,” or “Mary’s mother told Mary that Mary should do Mary’s mother’s homework,” or even, “Mary’s mother told Mary that Mary’s mother should do Mary’s homework.” Most of these interpretations are unlikely or stupid. But the fact that they are possible (whereas they are not with the “father” sentence) means that the sentence is ambiguous.

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Standardized tests love to exploit these alternate meanings by using sentences such as, “Ms. Chang angered the Senator by reporting that her company had violated the new environmental statutes.” What’s wrong here? After reading this far, you’ve probably inferred that the problem is that the Senator could be female, and that the pronoun is therefore ambiguous. Whose company is it? (If the sentence were in context and we knew the Senator to be male, then this sentence would be fine, just as it is, of course, fine to use a person’s name in one sentence and a pronoun in place of the name in subsequent sentences).

Back to Jen, Brad, and Angie. WHO THE HELL IS “THEIR”? (Or, more grammatically, “To whom the hell does ‘their’ refer?” Has anyone ever said “to whom the hell” before?)

Imagine the same sentence reworked, but in a case in which you had no outside information. “A finally encountered B and C, four years after their big fight.” Whom would you think had the fight? A and B? B and C? All three of them? If I changed “fight” back to “marriage,” you could quite reasonably infer that only two people may be involved, but would that tell you that A and B were the people who had been married?

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Let’s fix it. One option is: “Jennifer Aniston finally encountered Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie face-to-face, four years after Aniston and Pitt’s marriage ended.” Or maybe, “Four years after her marriage to Brad Pitt ended, Jennifer Aniston finally encountered Pitt and Angelina Jolie face-to-face.” Or, “Four years after Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt’s marriage ended, Aniston finally encountered Pitt and Angelina Jolie face-to-face.”

Us Weekly? Call me.

Sincerely,

Jen

Posted by jen | Filed Under celebrities, grammar 

Comments

4 Responses to “Words (Specifically Pronouns) Mean Things”

  1. econoholic on March 6th, 2009 4:36 am

    WHO THE HELL IS “THEIR”? (Or, more grammatically, “To whom the hell does ‘their’ refer?”

    Help me out, please. Why is the second more grammatical? Is it just that it’s active rather than passive voice?

  2. Noah on March 10th, 2009 10:53 am

    Don’t we already know the context though? Brad is currently married to Angelina and no longer married to Jen. And, for some reason, everyone on the planet who has access to TV, magazines, or the internet (or runs a 3rd world adoption agency), knows these facts.

  3. jen on March 13th, 2009 3:05 am

    Oh, it’s just that the first sentence is a bit imprecise, implying that the person I want to know about (“who”) actually IS the word “their,” rather than being referenced by the word “their.”

    The who/whom is a red herring — each is correct in the sentence in which it was used.

    Jen

  4. jen on January 26th, 2010 2:38 am

    The context doesn’t matter, Noah — pronouns must always have an unambiguous antecedent.

    In the sentence, “Joe and John hung out with Liz, and he was really sexually attracted to her,” it doesn’t matter if you know that John is a homosexual and therefore the “he” is Joe; grammatically, the sentence is still wrong.

    This shouldn’t be a shock — many ungrammatical sentences can still be understood, of course.

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