Pronoun reference is the idea that if you have a pronoun you need to make sure
that it refers back clearly to a noun that came before, and we call this noun
the antecedent, from Latin. [The] antecedent means that which goes before. Typically
then we need to make sure that our pronoun is quite close to our noun. We
don't have other nouns in between as much as possible, because that might
confuse us. And we want this kind of clarity about what it refers back to. But
there are exceptions of course. If you say for instance "it's raining" ...
then "it" is your pronoun and it doesn't refer back to anything.
It's rather abstract. So there are cases where you don't have pronoun reference,
but where you do you want to make sure that you use pronoun reference correctly.
And that's what we're talking about in this video: some cases where pronoun
reference has been done badly and we want to talk about how we can fix it. If
you were to say, then, "their," let's say rather than "his," that would be weak
pronoun reference. "My friend always loses their cool" -- that doesn't really
make sense. So let's look at some other situations where we want to be on our
guard. The next one here goes, "the company's legal documents suggest that
it can't be held responsible." So "it" here refers back to something and you can see
that it refers back to "company," and this one seems okay because "company" is ...
a collective noun, but it refers to one entity even though it has multiple
component parts -- multiple units let's say. So it seems okay. They're
both singular grammatically, but the problem is that the antecedent is in the
possessive case ... and all that means is that it has this
apostrophe + s over here. The rule then to watch out for is that your antecedent
should not be in the possessive case. Seems like a bit of a funny rule, but you
can see how awkward this is in the next one.
"In Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury he writes ..." It'd be much easier just to
say "in The Sound and the Fury
Faulkner writes ..." We can just switch this around and that would be much more
direct. So "In the Sound and the Fury, Faulkner writes ..." This is an error that
I've seen so often in in people's papers, because they start their essay with
a phrase like "in so-and-so's text" and then they say "he writes." So really watch
out for that one because it's quite common. The next one has to do with these
collective nouns that we've mentioned and often the collective noun takes a
singular pronoun, so this case "committee" is singular even though it might have
multiple members. "It's" is singular as well and that's correct. But sometimes
you can break that rule. If you take a collective noun like "jury" and you're
talking about the individual members, then in some cases you're allowed
to use a plural pronoun. In this case it says, "The jury was told that they
should not follow any media coverage" (there should be a period there I guess). And if
... the jury members are each individually being instructed
to do this, then you would be allowed to say "they," although maybe it sounds a
little bit awkward. Okay, so watch out for collective nouns. The next one has to do
with indefinite pronouns, and "everyone" is one of these. I'm only going to look at
one example here with you because we have a separate video on shifts in
perspective -- shifts in perspective that have have to do with pronouns -- and I
would suggest you have a look at that. But the main thing to watch out for is
if you have these indefinite pronouns like "everyone," "somebody," "someone," "each," and
so on, they can often be a little bit tricky. In this case "their" would
technically be incorrect because "one" of course is singular even though it says "every."
And so it should be "these days everyone wants to have his or her." That
would be grammatically correct, and in an essay you would probably want to go with that
option. But this "their" is becoming much more common these days, and it's a bit
more informal but I think it's well on its way to becoming accepted in the English
language. So something to watch out for anyway. Two more here. Now we've mentioned
this issue of gender (his or her) and the general rule is that if you have to
refer to gender ... if you have to be politically correct multiple times in a
row (like he or she and him or her) it gets a little bit awkward -- it gets a bit
tedious. In that case what I would suggest you is
that you put these pronouns in the plural. You might say something like
"When people are nervous ..." "When people (that's plural) are nervous, they
are more likely to stutter, and this may affect people's perception of them." And
just try to follow that general rule: if you end up having to use "he" or
"she," "him" or "her" (you know, these gender-neutral kind of constructions) a
lot of times in a row it's probably best just to shift to the plural. And then the
last one here shows a pronoun that has multiple possible antecedents. "His" could
refer back to Peter or it could refer back to John, and we don't really know.
Which one is it? Sometimes though it can be really hard to rewrite this in
a way that avoids this problem and sometimes you're simply going to be
stuck with some ambiguity. I'll let you try this yourself: see if you can
express this in a way that's easy and clear without adding in
brackets "(Peter)" or something like that. Don't do that. That
that looks really pathetic. But without doing that see if you can actually
rewrite it for clarity, and if you can't then maybe you need to rewrite the whole
sentence from scratch and start over completely, or maybe leave it as is and
just accept a little bit of ambiguity once in a while. Okay, that's it for
pronoun reference. Hopefully you can avoid these grammatical mistakes.