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Discourse and Inference
It is very common for editors or teachers to warn against ambiguous pronouns in a piece of writing. But what counts as ambiguous? Here are six examples of writing pulled from newspapers. All of them contain a pronoun (in boldface) that introduces more than one grammatically compatible antecedent. But not all of these examples are likely to cause any interpretation problems.
For each example, discuss whether you think it is likely to lead to trouble resolving the antecedent. Think of the various factors that influence pronoun resolution. In some cases, you might predict that there would be a temporary difficulty that would be resolved further downstream in the sentence as more information is gathered.
Describe how you could test to see whether the sentence in question actually results in some processing difficulty. Make use of the experimental techniques you read about in this chapter (and think about appropriate comparisons).
Now find your own real-world examples. Try to find six examples of pronouns with more than one grammatically compatible antecedent. Aim to find three that you think pose no difficulty and three that you think might cause some trouble.
Examples
A. “If not, then the United States appears to have misled one of its closest allies to wrongfully incarcerate one of its own citizens.”
B. “Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney, who has repeatedly branded Khadr a hardened, dangerous terrorist and pledged to fight any attempt to lessen his punishment, would not comment in the memo.”
Secret U. S. memo suggests no legal basis to charge Omar Khadr with war crimes. Calgary Herald, July 2, 2014.
C. “The police said they were reviewing footage from security cameras along the street; the imam said they have been used in the past to identify and arrest Palestinian stone-throwers.”
Tension mounts after apparent revenge killing in Jerusalem. New York Times, July 2, 2014.
D. “There are neither victims nor villains in this story; no sympathy is being asked for, and no fingers are being pointed. But as a city, we’ve got a problem. Because the market suggests they can, landlords are using this moment to demand the significantly higher rents they’ve been waiting for since first betting on their neighborhoods.”
There goes the neighborhood café. New York Times, July 2, 2014.
E. “Researchers worked with 48 toddlers, each held by an assistant and gently bounced for about two minutes to the rhythm of the Beatles’ version of Twist and Shout. They faced an experimenter who bounced in the same rhythm or off beat.”
How music may make babies team players. New York Times, July 1, 2014.
F. “Nonetheless, the editorial said the episode had further highlighted flaws in [the journal] Nature’s procedures and sloppiness among scientists. It said steps were being taken to improve the rigor of submitted papers.”
Stem cell research papers are retracted. New York Times, July 2, 2014.