I’m trying to work out my message parameter substitutions here… I can read the table well enough, but I’ve got an odd effect I don’t know how to get rid of.
The problem output is:
"…you are still gloating over yours win. "
The code for this is:
msg += '{the dobj/he} {is} still gloating over {its/hers} win. ';
…I don’t know enough about how these parameters are handled. Why is the possessive form for “you” resolving to “yours?”
That is, if it were acting as a noun, this would work: the button is its/hers/yours. But, it is its/hers/your button.
How do I get it to act as a modifier and not as a noun?
I have no idea how to solve this problem, but it brought back a very old memory. In my first novel, Walk the Moons Road, I used a rare double possessive by elision. The silly editor made me take it out. Here’s the sentence:
As weird as that is, I maintain that it’s grammatically correct. It’s saying that his people were her people’s enemies.
It’s because you’ve used the wrong message parameter - “{its/hers}” instead of “{its/her}”. This should work:
msg += '{the dobj/he} {is} still gloating over {its/her} win. ';
Because some pronouns can be used in several different grammatical situations (e.g. “its button”/“the button is its”), TADS needs you to make it totally clear which kind of pronoun you want. The “its” half of “{its/her}” tells TADS that you want a possessive pronoun, but since “its” has two different grammatical functions, you also need either “her” or “hers” to indicate which possessive pronoun you want.
An easy way to make sure you’ve used the right substitution is to read the sentence twice, once with the first half of the substitution and then with the second half of the substitution, e.g. “The dobj is still gloating over its win. The dobj is still gloating over hers win.” If one of the sentences sounds wrong, that’s where your problem is - so in that example, you can tell that the problem is with the use of “hers” instead of “her”.