Tuesday, February 28, 2012

nouns - Parentheticals - referential, and antecedent use of pronouns

I am giving feedback on the following sentence:





"After one other attack (almost killing Chief Brody’s children) he decides that he needs to take action and he, Matt Hooper (marine biologist) and Quint (shark hunter) go off in Quint’s boat."




My issues / question:




  • This is grammatically confusing writing - the 'he' pronoun refers to no noun / subject in the sentence.

  • Obviously the author intends us to understand 'he' as referring to the parenthetical use of the proper noun 'Chief Brody'.

  • QUESTION 1: This is, surely, precluded by the use of parentheses as adding additional information, rather than key information (such as proper nouns)?


  • The sentence: "After one other attack (almost killing his children) Brody decides that he needs to take action..." would be correct. However, this does not follow the law that the pronoun 'his' should follow the noun 'Brody'.

  • QUESTION 2: Is there a deeper grammatical law I need to know to explain all this?

  • Meta-question 1: Am I making too many metaphors with nesting in programming space (or thesis statements in philosophy) and the English used in the first block-quoted sentence is fine, when it comes down to it?


    • Meta-question 2: What sort of modification's can be carried out in parentheses? For example, is the sentence "The boy (who was named Jim) ran away..." correct because it explicitly names the noun, rather than implicitly? E.g. "Running away (for the boy named Jim) wasn't new..." is stylistic, rather than incorrect.


  • Pedagogical question: how does one teach this in a simple way?

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