While doing graduate studies in psycholinguistics, Jessica Love of Ohio State University got so obsessed with pronouns that it has been difficult to shut her up about them ever since. In “They Get to Me,” an essay she wrote for the Spring 2010 issue of the
American Scholar.org, Love says that using pronouns correctly actually requires a lot of work. She explains: “A person has to strike a balance between referencing something and not beating other folks over the head with it. Striking this balance requires quite a bit of attention. And when attention goes, so does proper pronoun use.”
Love, a PhD candidate in cognitive psychology, says that because pronouns only contain vague information, there has to be a whole lot of context for something so vague to effectively retrieve a word’s meaning. “Imagine all the words contained in your mind as a vast pool of fish,” she says. “Look carefully and you’ll see that each fish is different from all the others. If you had a hook selective enough, you’d be able to control which fish you catch. But pronouns are not selective hooks. Pronouns are sweeping nets. You have to cast your net shallowly in the hopes that you catch the one noun the pronoun refers to.”
She goes on to describe pronouns as “talking trilobites, the last remnants of an Old English with a very different—and much richer—morphology.” She explains: “English used to always mark case: words were pronounced differently depending on their part of speech. Now the only words that still mark case are pronouns:
I,
we,
he,
she, and
they when the pronoun appears as a subject;
me,
us,
him,
her, and
them when it appears as an object. Second-person pronouns used to mark case, too, but
ye, the pronoun marked for subject, is already obsolete. After all, we don’t really need case anymore. Word order takes care of everything.”
Ever on the lookout for new areas of pronoun research, Love happily notes that there are so many more pronouns to feed her obsession. “Lucky for me,” she says, “there are plenty of pronouns in need of more study—the diectics (
here,
there), the reflexives (
himself,
themselves), the interrogatives (
who,
what), the possessives (
his,
mine), the indefinites (
somebody,
anything)—each with its own relatively unexamined life. Or, for the freshest pronoun around, I could always coin one myself.”
Read Jessica Love’s “They Get to Me” in the American Scholar.org now!RELATED READING:In “Semantic Minefields,” an essay he wrote for the May 14, 2010 issue of
The New York Times, the paper’s Public Editor Clark Hoyt asks: “If the Obama administration takes out a radical Muslim cleric hiding in Yemen, would it be a ‘targeted killing’ or an ‘assassination?’ Was the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina a ‘natural disaster’ or a ‘man-made’ one? Should new construction authorized by Israel in East Jerusalem be called Jewish ‘housing’ or ‘settlements’?” He then goes on to cite more instances of debatable or questionable semantics and observes: “If some readers feel The Times sometimes softens the truth, others believe journalists use shorthand that sometimes distorts it.”
Read Clark Hoyt’s “Semantic Minefields” in The New York Times now!
