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Stenka25 Posted 11 years ago
Vocabulary

The pronoun problem

the pronoun problem

The passage below is from ‘the Blank Slate’ by Steven Pinker.

http://evolbiol.ru/blankslate/blankslate.htm

Evolution is central to understanding ourselves because signs of design in human beings do not stop at the heart or the eye. For all its exquisite engineering, an eye is useless without a brain. Its output is not the meaningless patterns of a screen saver, but raw material for circuitry that computes a representation of the external world. That representation feeds other circuits that make sense of the world by imputing causes to events and placing them in categories that allow useful predictions.

In this passage I want to know what the underlined pronoun ‘them’ refer to.
It seems to represent causes in the context.

Am I right?
(If not, what does it stand for?)

Regards.
  

Top answer

Stenka25 I want to know what the underlined pronoun ‘them’ refers to. causes

  • Stenka25 I want to know what the underlined pronoun ‘them’ refers to.
  • causes
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8 Answers
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Stenka25I want to know what the underlined pronoun ‘them’ refers to.
causes
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The syntax of the sentence makes "events" the antecedent, but the semantics requires that "causes" be the antecedent.
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Thanks a lot, Mister Micawber.
Thanks a lot, deadrat.

Let I ask one more pronoun, I mean relative pronoun ‘that’ in ‘that allow useful predictions.’
Is ‘that’ also stands for ‘causes’?

Thanks a million.
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by imputing causes to events and placing them in categories that allow useful predictions.

What is it that lets us make predictions? It's the imputing of causes and the placing in categories. The antecedent of "that" is the compound object of the preposition "by," which happens to be the two clauses.

The sense doesn't allow "causes" to be the antecedent by itself because
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Thanks a lot for your thoughtful answer.
In semantic sense I think your answer makes sense.

But if so, the antecedent of 'that' is 'part of the sentence.'
In that case, It seems that if there is contradiction in the grammar sense.

As far as I know, if the antecedent of the relative pronoun is 'part of the sentence' or 'previous clause,' then only 'which' can be used to ma
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Just to confuse the issue: I read 'that' as referring only to 'categories'. It is the resulting categories that allow predictions. Of course, I don't know what Pinker is really on about.
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That representation feeds other circuits that make sense of the world by imputing causes to events and placing them in categories that allow useful predictions.

I think you're right that English doesn't admit of a restrictive sentential relative clause, as in "The streets were empty that...." And I also think you're right that we have to find antecedents that make syntactic and gr
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Thanks a lot as always, Mister Micawber.
Thanks a lot for yet another thoughtful reply, deadrat.

Your replies made my English reading a wider perspective.
Thank you for everything.

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