'Toni Morrison's genius enables her to create novels that arise from and express the injustices African Americans have endured' That is from a test set by a College Board and discussed in today's NYT. The Board thought it correct. A teacher of journalism in Maine objected that "'her' does not refer back to Toni Morrison but to Toni Morrison's". The sentence had an error of grammar.To me the word 'her' refers to the genius of Toni Morrison, is to be read accordingly,and the sentence is correct as written. The genius of Toni Morrison enables her.This is so blindingly obvious to me that it blinds me to what the error is supposed to be; I boldly assume that writing 'the genius of..' would not break some rule of grammar. Can anyone explain what the complaint means and how this sentence should be written to conform with the rules?

The sentence is entirely correct as written.

You, however, are mistaken in saying that her refers to genius (or to the genius of Toni Morrison). It does not. It refers to Toni Morrison.

It doesn't matter in the least that Toni Morrison is in the possessive form here, nor would it matter if we used the "genitive of" construction instead, saying "The genius of Toni Morrison enabled her..."

I wonder what the misguided journalism teacher from Maine would say about sentences like "Tom's father beat him" or "Shelley's muse deserted him." As for explaining why the journalism teacher objected, I would use one word: ignorance.

[This message was edited by maiku on 05-25-03 at 09:55 AM.]

Indeed .A slip of the mouse there. I meant relates to the genius (i.e. as object and subject) ; the true antecedent of 'her'here is T.Morrison as the owner of the genius.

You'll be interested to know that the Board withdrew the question as a result of the objection; the NYT says it was in a test on grammar !

The NYT man, a copy editor, says mockingly that the critic was right on the technical point without explaining how or why, hence my question. He says nonetheless that the sentence is correct The complaint seemed meaningless; the noun is still the same name, whether expressed as genitive or nominative . His complaint is that such critics do the language a disservice .Clarity and common sense mattered; the flexibility of the language was a joy; so what if the disdainful ' I could care less' plainly meant the exact opposite ?

All I can say, Fred, is that this NYT copy editor appears to be nearly as ignorant as the journalism teacher from Maine.

The sentence is impeccable in its syntax. There is no other possible antecedent in it for her except Toni Morrison. The case has nothing whatsoever to do with ones like how to understand "I could care less" as "I couldn't care less, " where indeed it may be appropriate to refer to the flexibility of language and common sense. Quite unlike this kind of thing, the use of the pronoun her in the sentence you cite is an absolutely paradigm example of the regularity of pronominalization in English. The phrase at the start of the sentence is understood as "T.M's genius enabled T.M. to..." Use of her to replace the second occurrence of T.M. is standard English grammar, if anything is.

Note that the second noun may not, in fact, be identical in reference to the first. Above, I used the example "Shelley's muse deserted him (Shelley)." But one could also say, "Shelley's muse helped herself (Shelley's muse) to his (Shelley's) brain." Lots of variations on these, but all of them pretty much squarely in the center of English syntactic practice with pronouns.