J.J. Andrews Eng. 702x [email protected] Dec. 4, 2008 Prof. Roy

What Does ‘It’ Mean?

When he is angry, Mayor Michael Bloomberg appears to frequently use the pronoun it when speaking to New York City newspapers. The mayor used the pronoun six times in four sentences of direct quotations published Dec. 2, 2008, while describing his frustration with a local professional football player who accidentally shot himself in the leg at a dance club and then attempted to cover the incident up. According to a quote in the Daily ews, Bloomberg said, “ ‘It's pretty hard to argue the guy didn't have a gun and that it wasn't loaded,’ Bloomberg said, lashing out at the man who caught the winning touchdown in the 2008 Super Bowl. / ‘You've got bullet holes in and out to show that it was there’ ” (Lombardi). Other than the mayor’s anger, one who studies the English language may be interested to find that there are three different antecedents for each occurrence of it in these back-to-back sentences. Bloomberg’s first use of it is a jump forward reference and relates to an argument that the person did not have a loaded gun; the second use of it is a jump back reference within the current sentence, referring to just the gun itself; and the third reference is a jump back to the previous sentence to a gun that is loaded. Pronouns such as it enable a person, as Bloomberg’s quotes demonstrate, to communicate more efficiently and avoid repetition. However, misinterpretation and confusion can result when it – a potentially vague pronoun – is overused or lacks one clear antecedent. Words are

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phonologically (sounds) and lexicologically (grammar) conditioned, as was discussed during the Sept. 4, 2008, session of Prof. Roy’s class on Modern English at Brooklyn College; when children begin attending school, they are attempting to connect the sounds to the symbols. The focus of this paper is to investigate the grammatical usage of pronouns, with an emphasis on the word it because of the word’s potential for overuse in present-day composition and conversation, and to identify how it can impede rather than enhance understanding. Through this analysis, the reader will realize that confusion from unclear its is most often the result of a communicator’s laziness in completely transmitting a text’s intended information. A person should not interpret this argument as suggesting the word it, as well as other pronouns, should be eliminated from use. This couldn’t be father from the truth because “personal and demonstrative pronouns are often used to avoid repetition and wordiness when antecedents are in adjacent clauses” (Celce-Murcia 309). Rather, the argument suggests one must take care when using pronouns so that its antecedent is clear. Just as the communicator wants to avoid repetition, there should be only one pronoun interpretation; multiple pronoun interpretations are most often the result of a communicator who has not mastered his or her intent or is being purposely vague or is being lazy in the creation of his or her text.

Initial Findings Text refers to “any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole.” A text can be written or spoken; in essence, text is a “unit of language in use” (Halliday 1). Daily newspaper publications are representative of formal texts in modern society – less stringent than academic-style texts but more organized than oral texts – and have been selected as the medium to be analyzed in this paper. More so than other texts, the goal of an

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effective newspaper is to transmit information that a recipient can understand. The “accuracy” of the texts will at no time be debated in this paper; only a text’s “understandability” is being evaluated. As of spring 2008, two of the country’s top circulated newspapers included USA Today at No. 1, circulating an average of 2.28 million newspapers per day, and The ew York Times at No. 3, 1.08 million per day (Hau). New York City’s top tabloid-style newspaper is the Daily ews, averaging 632,595 copies per day (Flamm). These three newspapers were selected because of their widespread distribution. The top five stories from each newspaper’s Web site, as listed by the newspapers themselves, comprise the selection of 15 stories analyzed for understandability and readability. Readability of newspaper articles was determined through an analysis of pronoun usage and by using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level reading formula installed in Microsoft Word software. Some of the findings include: •

Eight of 15 stories tested at grade 12 reading level; one was grade 11; three were grade 10; and three were grade eight. By newspaper, The ew York Times had four stories at level 12 and one at 8.4; USA Today had four at level 12 and one at level 10.4; and the Daily ews had one at level 11.2, two at level 10, and at level 8.5.

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Every story used the pronoun it at least once, with the smallest and largest percentages of it-to-total words both in the Daily ews with the story “Autopsy Confirms Wal-Mart Worker Was ‘Trampled to Death’ ” at 0.3 percent and the largest percentage “Mayor Bloomberg Fuming Over Plaxico Shooting” at 1.9 percent (Yaniv, Lombardi).

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Pronoun usage of it did not appear to impact whole-text reading levels. The frequency was similar for all grade levels, with level 12 using it 0.8 percent of the time (69 occurrences in 8,611 words), level 8 at 0.9 percent (20 of 2,337 words), level 10 at 1.2 percent (15 of 1,288 words), and level 11 at 1.3 percent (six of 473 words).

Despite the findings at the whole-text reading level, an increased risk of confusion was discovered during reading comprehension when the pronoun it was used more frequently at the paragraph-text and sentence-text levels. This paper will take a deeper look at several examples from three of the 15 newspaper stories that used it the most frequently, ranging from 1.0 to 1.8 percent.

Pronouns: A Grammatical Review In order to understand why some common uses of it are incorrect, persons must reacquaint themselves with the rules of pronouns. English has morpheme classes that are open and some that are closed. The classes of open morphemes are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs because “new words are added as they are coined,” while the minor morpheme classes – known as “closed” – serve more of a structural role in sentences and usually do not have any new words added (Celce-Murcia 15). The closed class includes auxiliary verbs, prepositions, determiners, conjunctions, and pronouns. A person needs to remember that it exists at the structural level of texts. Pronouns serve a specific communicative purpose; they do not elaborate; they are not decorative items. It is a plain toothpick that holds the fruit of an alcohol-flavored drink rather than one of those fancy-looking umbrellas.

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Pronouns “refer to or replace nouns and noun phrases within a text” or as “direct reference to an outside situation.” The most common types of pronouns are subject, object, reflexive, possessive, and demonstrative (Celce-Murcia 18). Pronouns that can serve as either subject or object are the most likely to create confusion because of their interchangeability, especially when the communicator uses the pronouns in such a way that each could have multiple meanings. Of the pronouns that fall into this category, it and you are the only pronouns that do not change forms and generate the most risk of confusion. When transitioning from subject to object, I becomes me, he becomes him, she becomes her, we becomes us, and they becomes them. The spelling changes do not eliminate all confusion; however, the confusion is limited to the subject referent point itself rather than the pronoun’s part of speech. But because it can be a subject or object, the receiver of the communication is even more dependent upon clear contextual references in order to determine accurate meanings. As alluded to in Bloomberg’s quote, pronouns can jump forward (cataphoric) to connect with its antecedent, jump backward (anaphoric), and jump out of the text (exophoric) with the expectation the reader can accurately interpret the pronoun. Coreferential is when “two items are identical in reference” (Halliday 3). This is what happens when it is substituted for pie in the following sentences: I enjoyed eating the pie. Did you enjoy it? The key to understanding this pronoun’s use is recognizing it is anaphoric, meaning it “refers back to” something else (Halliday 2). Cohesion refers to “relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it as a text” (Halliday 4). In other words, one portion of a text cannot be decoded without another part of the text. This requirement is especially important when dealing with pronouns. The rules of pronominalization focus on the sentence structure, allowing it to determine “whether at the second mention the entity will be named again or will be referred to by a pronoun. For example,

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we cannot say: John took John’s hat off and hung John’s hat on a peg. Instead, we would write: John took his hat off and hung it on the peg” (Halliday 8). The communicator must remember there is a structural relationship between an “item and the one that presupposes it” (Halliday 8). Pronouns such as this and here can point forward, which creates cataphora, meaning the pronoun refers to an element that follows. However, this only “arises if there is an explicitly presupposing item present, whose referent clearly either precedes or follows.” Often, cataphora consists of more than one sentence or is signaled by writing a colon (Halliday 17). Sometimes, the needed information for interpreting a text does not exist within the text. This is called exophora because the interpreter must go outside of the text completely in order to determine meaning. “The significance of the exophoric potential is that, in instances where the key to interpretation is not ready at hand, in text or situation, the hearer or reader constructs a context of a situation in order to supply it for himself” (Halliday 18). The relationship of items in a text relate back and forth to each other. “In the text it is natural for the element occurring second to depend for its interpretation on the one occurring first” (Halliday 19). In other words, the assumption during pronoun decoding will almost always be anaphoric, because “cataphora occurs only as an explicit relation, with the first element always being one that is inherently presupposing” (Halliday 19). The subject pronoun is the “historically older and formally prescriptive form, but the object pronoun is currently more frequently used and is certainly favored in informal speech” (Celce-Murcia 298). Analysis of the newspapers not only showed this to be true, but also that the vast majority of pronoun it usage occurred during direct quotations of a person who was speaking. Even though direct quotations comprise less than 25 percent of the total words in these 15 news stories, nearly half of the occurrences of it were within a direct quote.

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According to research by Frodesen and Eyring, using a pronoun or article de-emphasizes the referent while demonstratives give the referent more emphasis. Examples of this are the sentences “I’ve heard that joke before” vs. “I’ve heard it before” (Celce-Murcia 309). The second sentence’s focus is on the act of hearing, while the first sentence focus on what was heard.

Modern Day Uses of It in #ewspapers In the story “India Demands Pakistan Hand Over Fugitives,” it represents 1.0 percent of all words in the story, or expressed another way, appears 15 times out of 1,537 total words for a frequency of 1.0 percent. Remaining true to Halliday’s findings, most of the uses of it are anaphoric in the story and leave little room for interpretation. “The statement added tartly that Pakistan’s actions ‘needed to match the sentiments expressed by its leadership that it wishes to have a qualitatively new relationship with India’ ” (Worth). It refers back to the country of Pakistan in both instances; interpretations attempting to link it to statement or India are immediately ruled out because the sentence would not make contextual sense. Even when the author uses it three times in the same sentence – “But it could be accused of raising a red herring if it does not furnish convincing evidence for its claims of Pakistani involvement” – the pronoun is clearly anaphoric to “government,” which is mentioned in the previous sentence (Worth). A confusing use of it happens the first time the author uses the pronoun cataphorically: “Inspector Maria also said there were only 10 attackers in all, denying earlier suggestions by public officials that there had been more. However, it remains unclear whether the attackers had at least some accomplices on the ground before the violence began on Wednesday night” (Worth). A reader will most likely attempt to interpret the pronoun using the previous sentence,

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since it is the first word. None of the potential antecedents – additional attackers, 10 attackers, earlier suggestions – make sense in place of it in the next sentence. But if the reader jumps ahead in the sentence to the idea there were “some accomplices on the ground,” then the pronoun interpretation makes sense. The Daily ews story “Using poor villagers in Burger King TV spot is outrageous, critics say” is an example of cataphoric references generating pronoun confusion. The story has a reading level of 8.5 and an it frequency of 1.8 percent (five occurrences out of 276 words). The story’s first sentence is, “It's a taste test of global proportions, but many critics think Burger King's new ad campaign is just bad taste” (Townsend). The reference cannot be anaphoric because there are no previous sentences for it to refer to. In order to find the meaning of it, a reader has to process and answer the question: What is the taste test? The reader must connect the pronoun with the end of the sentence – Burger King’s new ad campaign – in order to determine meaning. This action causes the readability of that sentence to jump to level 10.8, even though the story as a whole is level 8.5, according to the Flesch-Kincaid formula. In these 15 newspaper stories, readability became more difficult in nearly every instance in which pronouns were used cataphorically rather than anaphorically. The ew York Times story “Hospital Did Not Report Burress’s Wounds” appears to have two examples of it being used exophorically. As a whole, the story’s reading level is 12 with or without the pair of exophoric uses of it and has frequency of 1.4 percent (12 occurrences in 864 words). However, the reader is challenged beyond mere lexicological interpretation; the reader must have inferential knowledge in order to accurately decipher what it means. The first instance happens in the story’s second sentence: “The New York police said on Monday that a hospital failed to notify them when Giants receiver Plaxico Burress arrived there

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early Saturday morning with a gunshot wound to his thigh, despite a state law requiring a doctor or hospital to report such violence to the authorities ‘at once.’ / As a result, it took police detectives more than 13 hours to learn that Burress had been taken to the hospital, NewYorkPresbyterian/Weill Cornell, after he accidentally shot himself in the right leg in a Manhattan nightclub” (Baker). So what did police detectives take more than 13 hours to do? The reference point is not as simple as “to learn,” nor is the answer as simple as “he accidentally shot himself.” It represents the entire process of discovery by the police, which includes law enforcement officials first learning from a TV news report that Burress was treated and released for a gunshot wound from a New York City hospital. This has not been mentioned in this story, but is understood as general knowledge by this writer. This assumption by the newspaper reporter expects readers to bring information to the text, rather than expecting the text to be all knowing without reader input. The risk for confusion and incomplete interpretations has just been increased. In this same story, New York City’s mayor continues demonstrating his preference for the pronoun it while expressing anger. Bloomberg uses it three times in a two-sentence quote, once cataphorically and the next two times exophorically. “It is just an outrage that the hospital didn’t do what they’re legally required to do. It’s a misdemeanor, it’s a chargeable offense, and I think that the district attorney should certainly go after the management of this hospital” (Baker). Bloomberg’s first it jumps forward in the sentence to the idea that the hospital “didn’t do what they’re legally required to do.” But in the next two instances, the it is not so clear. The most logical referent for it is the act of failing to report a gunshot wound, which is mentioned in the story’s very first sentence – 12 sentences before the mayor’s quote appears, a lifetime in a newspaper story. There is a problem with this interpretation because, in sentence seven, police

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detectives introduce the idea that hospital officials cited patient privacy laws as the reason why the gunshot injury was not reported. One could argue it actually pairs up with that antecedent. Or, it could more practically be explained exophorically as the entire situation – failing to report a gunshot wound for a local celebrity during a botched cover-up. None of these interpretations are perfectly clear, and each can be debated, resulting in potential reader confusion. More than a decade ago, one of my writing mentors was the sports editor of a small-town Ohio newspaper who was prone to fits of rage that exploded in the newsroom with little warning. He once bent an aluminum baseball bat into the shape of a boomerang while pounding it against a telephone pole one Friday night when the 20-game high school football results section caused the newspaper to miss deadline by 90 minutes. It was during this night, while the paper was only 25 minutes late for the printing press and he manically edited stories that had just been written, that he shouted, “IT HAS NO MEANING! IT SHOULD BE BANNED FROM THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. YOU GUYS ARE KILLING ME!” His proclamation was adhered to from that moment forward in his sports department and our sports section – perhaps by coincidence – placed in the top three of several newspaper competitions the next three years. What does this mean for teachers, whether the class is ESL, EFL, or traditional high school English? Students should continue to be allowed to use it and other pronouns. However, make sure pronouns assist in a story’s understandability rather than impede its clarity; follow Halliday’s suggestion that most pronouns are used anaphorically. Realize that, as is shown in these newspaper stories, it is rarely used in formal prose and is more common during informal speech. And in those rare occasions the pronoun must be used cataphorically or exophorically, make sure there is a clear referent point or else risk the wrath of a wild-eyed editor carrying a bent softball bat.

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Works Cited Andrews, Edmund L. “Officials Vow to Act Amid Signs of Long Recession.” New York Times. 2 Dec. 2008. The New York Times Co. 2 Dec. 2008 . Associated Press. “Panel warns biological attack likely by 2013.” USA Today. 2 Dec. 2008. Gannett Co. Inc. 2 Dec. 2008 . Baker, Al. “Hospital Did Not Report Burress’s Wound.” New York Times. 2 Dec. 2008. The New York Times Co. 2 Dec. 2008 . Celce-Murcia, Marianne, and Diane Larsen-Freeman. The Grammar Book. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 1999. Daily News. 2 Dec. 2008. NYDailyNews.com. 2 Dec. 2008 . Donohue, Pete. “New York City bus driver stabbed to death in Brooklyn; suspect in custody.” Daily News. 2 Dec. 2008. NYDailyNews.com. 2 Dec. 2008 . Flamm, Matthew. “National, NY newspaper circulation falls.” Crains New York Business.com. 27 Oct. 2008. Crain Communications, Inc. 2 Dec. 2008 .

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Hall, Mimi. “Obama seeks to assure governors on economy.” USA Today. 2 Dec. 2008. Gannett Co. Inc. 2 Dec. 2008 . Halliday, M.A.K., and Ruqaiya Hasan. Cohesion in English. London: Longman Group, 1976. Hau, Louis. “Timber! Newspaper Circulation Falls Again.” Forbes.com. 28 April 2008. Forbes.com LLC. 2 Dec. 2008 . Leinwand, Donna. “Holder a historic pick for A.G., with big challenges ahead.” USA Today. 2 Dec. 2008. Gannett Co. Inc. 2 Dec. 2008 . Lichtblau, Eric. “Pardon Is in Focus for Justice Nominee.” New York Times. 2 Dec. 2008. The New York Times Co. 2 Dec. 2008 . Lombardi, Frank. “Mayor Bloomberg fuming over Plaxico shooting: Throw the book at him.” Daily News. 2 Dec. 2008. NYDailyNews.com. 2 Dec. 2008 . The New York Times. 2 Dec. 2008. The New York Times Co. 2 Dec. 2008 . O'Donnell, Jayne. “Cyber Monday draws millions online for holiday shopping.” USA Today. 2 Dec. 2008. Gannett Co. Inc. 2 Dec. 2008 .

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Snider, Mike. “Video games top gift lists; retail sales rise.” USA Today. 2 Dec. 2008. Gannett Co. Inc. 2 Dec. 2008 . Sengupta, Somini. “Heroes of Mumbai, Terror Was a Call to Action.” New York Times. 2 Dec. 2008. The New York Times Co. 2 Dec. 2008 . Townsend, Matt. “Using poor villagers in Burger King TV spot is outrageous, critics say.” Daily News. 2 Dec. 2008. NYDailyNews.com. 2 Dec. 2008 . USA Today. 2 Dec. 2008. Gannett Co. Inc. 2 Dec. 2008 . Vacchiano, Ralph. “Giants star Plaxico Burress arrives at stadium as team mulls future.” Daily News. 2 Dec. 2008. NYDailyNews.com. 2 Dec. 2008 . Worth, Robert. “India Demands Pakistan Hand Over Fugitives” New York Times. 2 Dec. 2008. The New York Times Co. 2 Dec. 2008 . Yaniv, Oren. “Autopsy confirms Wal-Mart worker was 'trampled to death,' says Nassau's top cop.” Daily News. 2 Dec. 2008. NYDailyNews.com. 2 Dec. 2008 .

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