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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: Rogue pronouns
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References: <19960905104609.baaa00752@babyblue.cs.yale.edu> <32726B6B.4C9D@scruznet.com> <E00D86.7z9@midway.uchicago.edu> <55alun$guq@grootstal.nijmegen.inter.nl.net>
Date: Fri, 1 Nov 1996 00:04:33 GMT
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In article <55alun$guq@grootstal.nijmegen.inter.nl.net>,
T.T. Gerritsen <T.Gerritsen@inter.nl.net> wrote:
>deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff) wrote:
>
>>You're in the same boat with my gentleman friend (himself a college 
>>professor); I don't think any other construction I use annoys him more,
>>not even attaching the possessive 's' to a subject pronoun.  E.g.:  "Mark
>>and I's bedroom faced southeast."  (It's a classic example of something I
>>would have totally denied ever saying had I not been caught in the act
>>several times.)  Although I never use the prescriptivist construction
>>("Mark's and my...") in speech, I occasionally set my sights on it and
>>come out with the compromise form "Mark and my's...".
>
>The most elegant solution, IMO (but I'm not a native speaker), would
>be "Mark's bedroom and mine faced southeast". "Mark's and my bedroom"
>sounds very strange to me.

	Unfortunately, "Mark's bedroom and mine..." is ambiguous:  Is
there one bedroom or two?  The statement can be made unambiguous in the
plural by adding "both", but nothing more can be done to help the
"singular".  

	(Oh, I just thought of another common way of avoiding both an 
awkward possessive construction and ambiguity:  "Mark and me, our bedroom
faced southeast."  Say it and watch the prescriptivists cringe!)

>>Although it sounds perfectly natural to be, I can see how this
>>non-standard case agreement could be jarring; what surprises me that so
>>many people still have trouble with "their" in the singular.  (E.g.
>>"Everyone should bring their towel along").  It fills an important need in
>>the language, the need for a gender-neutral third-person singular
>>pronomial adjective, and does it without introducing any ambiguity or
>>resorting to ugly neologisms. 
>
>This "their" may not be a neologism, but it IS ugly, I'd say, because
>it doesn't make sense to have a subject in the singular referred to by
>a "plural" pronoun. 

	In that case, "Them's good eatin'", "He's good people", and plenty
more non-standard but common (American) English expressions "don't make
any sense".  Except they *do* make sense to me, just not according to the
rules of formal (Latin) grammar which I learned in school.  Are they ugly?
I think that's a matter of exposure.  I grew up with them and they connote
familiarity in a way that formally correct statements never could; in that
way, they are "attractive" to me.

	And as for "making sense", how sensible is it to refer to single
persons with plural pronouns?  Yet languages do so all the time.
"Stimmen Sie nicht zu?"  "Vous m'avez entendu, monsieur?"  Speakers of
German violate otherwise strict rules of gender agreement to avoid
referring to persons with neuter pronouns.  "Hat das Fraeulein ihre
Schluessel vergessen?"  I think it makes as much sense to prefer natural
gender agreement to grammatical gender agreement as it does to prefer
natural gender agreement to grammatical number agreement.

>I do have trouble with it, because you can easily
>substitute "everyone" by "all", which is also gramatically plural,
>resulting in: "All (people) should bring their towels along" (also
>avoiding having to use the strange combination "their towel"), which
>is both grammatically and politically :-) correct. 

	Except "all" can also be grammatically singular.  "He's got it
all."  "It's all Greek to me."  "Take it; all of it is yours."  And so
forth.  Although I don't have any figures handy, I'd venture to say that "all"
more often refers to inanimates (as it does in all the preceeding
cases) than animates, which may partially account for people's resistence
to using it solo to refer to persons.  Who wants to be lumped together
with "everything" besides "young women" who don't mind being called "it"?

-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
