Them and They, their refer to the same antecedent noun?

[duyng9989]

Hi.

I have a question:

Can "they", "Them" and "their" refer to different antecedent noun in a sentence?


I remember that it is impossible since there is one OG question that they and them cannot refer to different antecedents and that answer is wrong. (I cannot recall the question)

I just want to clarify because I see an example:

Because land based wells require more digging, calculations for estimating the amount of oil in an oil well do not apply as well to THEM as THEY do to deep sea wells.

In that example, them and they refers to lands based wells and calculations.

Thank you

[RonPurewal]

this is not a hard rule -- i.e., it's not something that is 100% wrong in all cases, everywhere -- so here's the best advice i can give you:

* if this is not the basis for a difference between answer choices, then ignore it.
i.e., there should be some answer choices in which this happens, and others in which it doesn't. if that's not the case, then it's a non-issue.
(in fact, this principle holds for every issue you could ever possibly think of. it probably sounds rather obvious, too, but many people forget about it when they're looking at single example sentences and trying to make absolute decisions about "right"/"wrong" rather than thinking in relative terms about different answer choices.)

if it's the basis for a difference between answer choices:

* if the pronouns create significant confusion in your mind when you read that version of the sentence once, then eliminate the choice(s) in question.
(note: the "once" here is important. when a pronoun is used properly, regardless of whether the sentence contains a ton of nouns, it should be immediately apparent what the pronoun is intended to mean. if you have to re-read the sentence and ponder the meaning of the pronoun, then the pronoun is most likely problematic, unless your understanding of the original meaning is sufficiently shaky.)

* if the pronoun is corrected to a specific noun or eliminated altogether, then eliminate the choices containing the pronoun.
-- for instance, if this problem had some answer choices with "them" (as used here) and some with that pronoun replaced by "land-based wells", you'd do well to go with the latter.
-- in this sentence, you could also just eliminate "as they do" altogether, and write the sentence as "... as to deep-sea wells". the subject and verb are still the same as they were in the previous clause, so there's no need to repeat them. if you were faced with this split, then the more compact version would of course be the superior choice.