CONFUSED

Howdy!

I think I might be able to help here.

[email protected] wrote:
"While depressed property values can hurt some large investors, they are potentially devastating for homeowners, whose equity – in many cases representing a life’s savings – can plunge or even disappear."

By the OG, The sentence above, choice (A), is correct. OG says, “they” refers to property values. Why is there not an ambiguity here with large investors?

I can see why this might be confusing! We learn to eliminate all potential ambiguity and make sure that there is one and only one antecedent for a pronoun. We focus on the structure of our sentence, the words we choose, and sometimes forget that there is some common sense and logic that we can rely on as well. I think this sentence is one of those cases where we can logically determine what "they" is and is not referring to. Let me show you what I mean.

Let's form two sentences where replace the "they" with potential antecedents. I'll eliminate some of the sentence so we can focus on this issue:

1. Large investors are potentially devastating for homeowners, whose equity can plunge or even disappear.

2. Depressed property values are potentially devastating for homeowners, whose equity can plunge or even disappear.

One of these sentences makes more sense than the other and fits with the logic or the original sentence. The second sentence makes more logical sense since later in the sentence we have this idea of something "plunging or disappearing." It makes more sense to think about property values dropping in this context than investors. We'd never think that investors would plunge unless they are skydiving.

A second clue here is to look at the subject of the clause that starts the sentence—"While depressed property values can hurt some large investors." The subject here is "depressed property values" not "larger investors." As such, the main subject of the main clause of the sentence will be the same subject—"depressed property values."

Let's take a look at the example sentence you asked about now.

[email protected] wrote: Take this for example –

While depressed property values can hurt some large investors, they can always mitigate their losses by timing the market.

This sentence is a bit more ambiguous, but we can still apply the same logical analysis—What is capable of "mitigating losses"? Well, certainly not "depressed property values" since these are not agents and have no way to act in any way. This is a thing not a person. But investors definitely can act to "mitigate losses" so the pronoun is obviously referring back to investors. This sentence does violate the second consideration that I mentioned above, so I would revise the sentence ultimately.

When thinking about antecedent-pronoun agreement, the issue is when there are two nouns that potentially could be referred to by the antecedent. There are two logically equal antecedents that make the pronoun ambiguous. So on top of analyzing the syntax of a sentence, you also need to consider the semantics as well. Does the pronoun logically refer to only one of the plural nouns? Could we confuse the pronoun with two nouns in the sentence?

I hope that I was able to shed light on this issue. It's not easy and definitely requires a lot of practice.

Best of luck in your studies! Go dominate the test!