Many years ago, a prestigious English-proficiency testing organization in the United States had to rescore the test papers of over 500,000 test-takers when it found out that one of its grammar questions could be answered in two ways. The problematic passage in the error identification test was this:
“Toni Morrison’s genius enables (A) her to create novels (B) that arise from (C) and express the injustice African Americans (D) have endured.” (E) No error.The test developer’s intended answer was, of course,
“(E) No error,” but someone persuasively pointed out that
“(A) her to create novels” was grammatically wrong and should then be the correct answer. The argument: although it could be assumed that
“her” in choice (A) refers to Toni Morrison herself, some grammar books actually frown on such a construction, pointing out that a pronoun shouldn’t refer to a noun in the possessive case (in this case,
“Toni Morrison’s”) when the noun is functioning as a modifier.
To make the test sentence scrupulously correct and retain the
“(E) No error” answer, the problematic statement had to be revised as follows:
“Toni Morrison’s genius enables (A) Morrison to create novels (B) that arise from (C) and express the injustice African Americans (D) have endured.” (E) No error.The above revision isn’t a very elegant sentence, of course, but the grammar flaw that prompted it clearly illustrates
the need to avoid using pronouns with unclear or ambiguous antecedents. For admittedly, someone who doesn’t know that Toni Morrison is the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist—someone who could be, say, a Martian visiting the Earth a century from now—could very well accept Morrison’s literary genius semantically, but would never be sure if the
“her” in the sentence was Morrison herself.
We can see that the responsibility to be clear about things is the writer’s, not the reader’s.
Errors that stem from such unclear antecedents of pronouns come in three types:
unidentified reference,
indefinite reference, and
ambiguous reference. They thrive on the writer’s assumption—often wrong—that readers will somehow know what is obvious in his or her mind. The antidote for the resulting vagueness, of course, is to give a clear antecedent for each personal pronoun used in a sentence.
1. Unidentified reference. Habitual use of the pronouns “it,” “they,” “this,” “that,” “them,” and “which” without a clear referent is
the most common cause of ambiguity in prose. Let’s examine some examples:
Unidentified referent: “It was clear from the start that she wouldn’t marry me.”
Improved with a clear referent: “
She made me understand from the start that
she wouldn’t marry me.”
Unidentified referent: “At the Rizal Park on Sundays,
they upturn their umbrellas and implore the heavens to fill them
with blessings.” (Who are
“they” who upturn their umbrellas and implore the heavens to fill those umbrellas with blessings?)
Improved with clear referents: “
El Shaddai devotees upturn
their umbrellas at the Rizal Park on Sundays and
implore the heavens to fill those umbrellas with blessings.” (This time it is made clear that the
“El Shaddai devotees” are the
referent for the pronouns
“they” and
“their.” Unidentified referent: “I have dealt with so many illogical passages, fractured grammatical constructions, and obscure idioms,
but this is absolutely ridiculous.” (To what referent does the pronoun “this” refer to? There’s no way of knowing.)
Improved with clear referent: “I have dealt with so many illogical passages, fractured grammatical constructions, and obscure
idioms, but this illogical passage [or grammatical construction or idiom] is absolutely ridiculous.” (This time it is clear that the
pronoun “this” refers to the “illogical passage, [or grammatical construction or idiom].”
Oftentimes we can also fall into the trap of using the pronoun “you” to refer to people in general rather than to the person we are
addressing.
Confusing: “In my town in the old days
you had to walk to school several kilometers on foot, or else ride a carabao-
drawn sled.”
Better and clearer: “In my town in the old days
we [or
people] had to walk to school several kilometers on foot, or
else ride a carabao-drawn sled.” (In literary writing, of course, we may be forgiven for occasionally using the figurative
“you” for effect.)
2. Indefinite reference. Another enemy of clarity is using a pronoun to refer to an idea expressed weakly in another word or
phrase. In this case, we have to rework the sentence to make the antecedent clearer or, better yet, supply a clear antecedent
noun.
Vague referent: “Alberto plays arcade games at the malls. It takes up most of his time during school vacations.” Neither the
verb “plays” nor the noun phrase
“arcade games”—much less
“malls”—can be the antecedent of the pronoun “it” in the
second sentence.
Better and clearer: “Alberto plays arcade games at the malls. Playing
them takes up most of his time during school
vacations.
3. Ambiguous reference. When we construct sentences, the pronouns we use may sometimes logically refer to more than one
word or noun phrase elsewhere in the sentence. This often happens when a noun or pronoun falls between the pronoun and its
proper antecedent. The only solution is to rewrite the sentence.
Ambiguous referent: “Before putting the old trunk in the storeroom, I emptied it.” (What did I empty: the trunk, the
storeroom, or both?)
Better and clearer: “I emptied the old trunk before putting it in the storeroom.”
Conversely, but also correct: “I emptied the storeroom before putting the old trunk in it.”
Now that we know such problems with pronouns with vague antecedents, we should make it a regular part of our self-editing routine to avoid or to correct them.
This essay, which forms Chapter 44 of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, first appeared in my weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in
The Manila Times,©2009 by the Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times
:Handling pronouns with unclear antecedentsNext week:
Dealing with various levels of intransitivity (September 12, 2024)
Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and X (Twitter) and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
