The farther a number is from 0 on its right... does 'its' refer to the number or 0? [closed]
The farther a number is from 0 on its right, the _____ is its value. (Choose between larger and smaller).
If 'its' refers to the subject number, then the correct answer is 'smaller'.
If 'its' refers to 0 then the correct answer is 'larger'.
Does the possesive its refer to the number or 0 (zero)?
In your question, the candidate antecedents to the pronoun "its" are:
- a number; and
- 0 (which we'll take as the origin).
To my ear, "its right" refers to the number's right. However, it could be argued that this is influenced by the second instance of "its" - its value refers to the number's value (not the value of "0"), and this affects the parsing of the first "its".
To test whether there is ambiguity in what the first "its" refers to, let's modify the sentence so that "its" can only have one candidate antecedent. We will use a (grammatically) gendered noun that requires its pronoun to not be neuter. Then place the neuter noun in each position in turn, and check whether the result makes sense. Instead of "a number" and "0", let's use "a dog" as the noun matching the neuter pronoun, and "the owner" as the noun without a matching neuter pronoun. We will also hide the second "its" to avoid any contextual colouring it might impose on the first "its".
- The farther a dog is from the owner on its right, ...
- (*) The farther the owner is from the dog on its right, ...
The first sentence makes sense but the second doesn’t. Even though the only neuter antecedent to "its" is "the dog", the second sentence still sounds as if the author tried to match "the owner" with "its".
That is, both sentences naturally parse to produce a noun phrase "the X on its right", where the antecedent of "its" is something other than X.
So in your example, "on its right" refers to the right of "a number", not to the right of "0".
Now, if you wanted to express the idea of sentence 2 - that is, have the owner to be on the right of the dog - you would need to break the coupling within the noun phrase "the X on its right". One way to do this is to add a comma before "on its right":
1a. The farther a dog is from the owner, on its right, ...
2a. The farther the owner is from the dog, on its right, ...
2b. The farther a number is from 0, on its right, ...
The comma detaches “on its right” from the noun phrase it follows, so the pronoun can refer (ambiguously) to either noun phrase.