|
In last week’s column, I invited readers to figure out if the case
usage of the following sentence from a recent housekeeping magazine
article is grammatically and semantically correct: “After a couple
of months, their newly acquired digital camera had gone missing from
Mary Ann and her husband’s bedroom.”
A reader, Ronald Galura, observes that the
sentence is inconsistent in case usage and suggests that the noun
“Mary Ann” should also be in the possessive case. Another
reader, Jaye Riggs, sees the sentence in an altogether different
light. She finds it “too fancy” and makes this observation:
“It even ‘animates’ the object camera by suggesting that it
had gone missing. I can almost imagine the camera having two feet
and sneaking away from Mary Ann’s and her husband’s room.”
Ronald’s observation about the sentence is
right on the dot, and I will now discuss precisely what’s wrong
with that sentence from a case standpoint. As I pointed out last
week, the applicable general rule here is this: For a combination of
a noun and pronoun to properly perform the action of a verb or
receive its action, or for them to jointly act as the compound
subject of a sentence, they should both be in the same case. In
other words, nouns and pronouns in different cases should never be
mixed. They should all be nominative, objective, or possessive when
performing the same grammatical function.
The problem with the sentence lies in the
prepositional phrase “from Mary Ann and her husband’s
bedroom.” The object of the preposition “from” is the noun
“bedroom,” but this noun is being wrongly modified by a noun and
pronoun pair in different cases. The noun “Mary Ann” is in the
objective case but the pronoun “her husband’s” is in the
possessive. This gives the cockeyed impression that there are two
objects of the preposition in the phrase—“Mary Ann” and “her
husband’s room.”
As Ronald suggests, the case mixing here can be
fixed by putting the noun “Mary Ann” in the possessive in the
same way as the pronoun “her husband’s.” The sentence will
then read correctly as follows: “After a couple of months, their
newly acquired digital camera had gone missing from Mary Ann’s and
her husband’s bedroom.”
Now let’s go back to Jaye’s interesting
observation about the original sentence. To fix its problem, she
says, “I think simplifying it is the key.” Indeed, she suggests
the following revisions: (1) “After a couple of months, Mary Ann
and her husband lost their newly acquired camera from their room.”
(2) “After a couple of months, Mary Ann’s newly acquired camera
went missing from her husband’s room. (“Not my favorite,” Jaye
says, “since I keep picturing the camera going AWOL.”)
The virtue of Jaye’s first sentence revision
is that it not only sidesteps the problematic case mixing but also
makes the original sentence simpler and more straightforward. Of
course, another way to simplify that sentence and still make use of
the compound possessive form is this construction: “After a couple
of months, Mary Ann’s and her husband’s newly acquired digital
camera had gone missing from their bedroom.” The semantics of this
sentence is faithful to the original; in contrast, Jaye’s second
version unduly changes the semantics by attributing the camera’s
ownership only to Mary Ann and the room’s ownership only to her
husband. (Jaye, it isn’t advisable to provoke marital conflict
over property ownership just to achieve grammatical simplicity!)
In the next column, we’ll take up some
contentious noun-pronoun case usage dilemmas before moving on to the
next type of annoying grammar errors.
CORRECTION: In the third to the last
paragraph of last week’s column, the word “nouns” in the
following sentence should have read “pronouns” instead: “And
one that correctly combines two nouns in the nominative case: “You
and I fell in love.” My apologies for the proofreading error.
(Next: More annoying grammar errors)
j8carillo@yahoo.com
|
