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That ain't good grammarPosted by William Porter, 5/28/03 10:38 PM The Washington Post reports a controversy involving the PSAT and a point of grammar. On a recent edition of the PSAT, student test-takers were asked if there was a grammatical error in the following sentence: Toni Morrison's genius enables her to create novels that arise from and express the injustices African Americans have endured. The makers of the PSAT thought that the correct answer was "No error." A high school teacher disagreed, fought with the PSAT, and managed to persuade the PSAT's governors that he was correct. The word "her," [the high school teacher] posited, was improperly referring to "Toni Morrison's," so the answer should have been "A," signifying a mistake in "her to create." Many grammar manuals insist that a pronoun such as "her" should refer only to a noun, not, as in the case of the possessive "Toni Morrison's," an adjective. Hmmm. Grammar: What it is, and what it ain'tBefore I reveal the truly correct answer, I have a couple quick points to make in reference to this controversy. 1. English grammar is not math. Send an algebra problem to fifty competent math teachers -- whether they hold advanced degrees or not -- and you will very likely get unanimity about the correct answer. But this is not the case with English grammar. I'm not talking about pseudo-problems such as whether it's "correct" for Mark Twain to use "ain't" when writing dialogue for Huck Finn. I'm talking about the real problems of correct, standard American English. Proof of my point is in the Washington Post's story: The PSAT's own board of experts had reviewed the sentence and felt that it was correct. It was only after the question was sent out to other experts that a different verdict was reached. I'd be curious to know how many outside experts were consulted, what their credentials were, and how many of them voted one way or the other. To make matters even more complicated, the line that separates grammar from rhetoric and stylistics is very blurry indeed. 2. At the same time, grammar, as we teach it (or should teach it) to young students, is not linguistics, either. Linguistics is descriptive, complex, and the object it describes is in constant flux. The notion of "correctness" has no place in linguistics. Grammar, like manners, is prescriptive or normative, so it does define what is correct and what is not. But the rules of grammar tend to be pretty straightforward, basic principles, and for that reason, it is reasonable and appropriate to expect even ordinary people to know them. And thus it is meaningful and useful to note that, in the social contexts in which someone is likely to be paying attention to such things, "Me and Robby got no monies" is likely to be considered ungrammatical, in several ways. If you put this sentence to two dozen responsible English teachers, the description of the faults may vary, the corrections probably won't: "Robby and I have no money." In view of points 1 and 2, it is fair to ask students to know the difference between what is acceptable usage and what is not, but it's outrageously unfair to students and therefore bad test design to pose tricky questions about English grammar. In a test aimed at sophomores and juniors in high school, sentences not clearly faulty should be considered correct. What's wrong with this sentence?Now, back to the sentence on the PSAT. Here again is the salient part of the explanation of why the sentence is faulty: Many grammar manuals insist that a pronoun such as "her" should refer only to a noun, not, as in the case of the possessive "Toni Morrison's," an adjective. In just these terms, the explanation of the alleged error in the test sentence is nonsense. "Tony Morrison's" is not an adjective, at least, not in traditional grammar. True, the whole theory of the parts of speech is rather squishy, since words belonging to one part of speech according to the dictionary may be used in ways that functionally suggest another part of speech altother. A noun may, for example, be used to delimit another noun, and thus take on some characteristics of an adjective. But the eight pigeon-holes that English grammar inherited from Latin (verb, noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, interjection) have proved durable and useful in pedagogy. And a noun doesn't mutate or metamorphose into an adjective just because it's made possessive, that is, the mere use of one noun to limit another does not endow the first noun with the defining characteristics of adjectives, viz. variable number and gender. So, while it is true that the antecedent of a pronoun can't be an adjective, it's so true is doesn't even need to be stated. Note that adjectives used substantively become like nouns. "Blessed are the Meek, for they shall..." Since I am prepared to believe that almost nobody at the Washington Post has any formal understanding of grammar -- this, by the way, isn't a knock against the WaPo, just a comment on the current state of affairs generally -- let me try to help them out. Perhaps they've stated the rule badly. Perhaps they really meant to say something like this: A noun in the possessive case should not be used as the antecedent of a personal pronoun. But that's not right at all. If it were, we'd all be tongue-tied half of the time. We couldn't say, "That's James's. He left it last night." Instead, we would have to say, "That belongs to James. He left it..." And that sort of pedantry is something up with which I will not put. In English, as in nearly all European languages, the rule that determines the antecedent of a pronoun is straightforward: a pronoun's antecedent is presumed to be the nearest, preceding eligible noun. "Catherine asked the yard men to get her cat down from the tree" is correct and unambiguous English: the nearest preceding noun to "her" is "yard men", but this is ineligible to be the antecedent of "her" because it's the wrong gender and the wrong number, so the antecedent must be "Catherine." That is the rule and it is pretty reliable. But reality trumps rules, that is, the presumption that the rule describes is, as the lawyers say, rebuttable. The reality is that the antecedent of a pronoun is the noun that context dictates be the antecedent. "On her eighteenth birthday, Catherine declared to her mother that she was moving away from home for good. Mother was unsettled by the news." Apply the rule rigidly and the pronominal subject of the subordinate clause in the first sentence ("she") must refer to "mother." In other words, what Catherine told Mom was "Pack your bags and find another place to live." But only someone who had spent too much time inventing subtleties would take the sentence in this way. This last example brings to mind another possible formulation of the rule that the Post was groping for: The antecedent of a pronoun should not be placed in a weak position in the sentence. Now we're getting somewhere. In the last example, the pronoun "she" was quite naturally and easily taken to refer back to "Catherine," which is in the strong position, rather than the nearer candidate "mother," which is in a weak position. And here is an illustration of this rule being violated: "The last piece on the program, which was written by Beethoven, was one of his early efforts." But the problem with this sentence is compositional rather grammatical. It has to be, because it's a bit tricky to define what is a "weak" position and what's not. And in any case, the beginning of a sentence in English is a very strong position, so this formulation doesn't support the claim that using "Toni Morrison's" as an antecedent is incorrect. Now the PSAT sentence is not unobjectionable. I for one dislike the lack of a hyphen in the phrase "African American." This is political correctness, not grammatical correctness. But the content of the sentence is suffused with PC, so I suspect I lose on this point. My grammatical eyebrow is also raised by the use of the word "injustices." This word is being used both as the object of the preposition "from" and as the direct object of the verb "express." This is faulty parallelism. But it's debatable. I'm not sure what Curme and Jespersen, two of the giants of English grammar, would say about my complaint here, but both men acknowledge that the prepositions that invariably follow certain verbs have arguably become a part of the verb itself. And the "ex-" in "express" is, at least etymologically, a precise counterpart to "from" following "arise." If I encountered this sentence on a student paper, I would criticize it as "awkward" rather than branding it as "incorrect." Bottom line: It's a lousy sentence and it should never have been on the PSAT in the first place. But it's not indisputably ungrammatical and I certainly would not have regraded half a million examinations because somebody thought it was. Archives |