Ambiguous Pronouns

[daniel.che.yi.chu]

Hi, please walk me through this example here from the SC guide (3rd edition), page 81:

Confronted by radical changes in production and distribution, modern Hollywood studios are attempting various experiments in an effort to retain THEIR status as the primary arbiters of movie consumption.

I tried to apply the rules:

1. Number: Correct
2. Gender: Correct
3. Repeats: no repeats
4. Proximity: closer to experiments, so points to experiments
5. Case: no parallelism here.

So, "their," in my assessment, refers to "experiments," which cannot have a status as the primary arbiters of movie consumption. Therefore, this is incorrect.

However, I understand that there's a "too close" rule in Proximity. If "experiments" is too close to "their," then the sentence will be correct.

Hence, please tell me whether this is the case. If so, then please explain to me when and how I should/can apply the "too close" rule.

Thanks.

[Ben Ku]

Although the Strategy Guide mentions proximity as one way to identify the antecedent, I don't think it's a great way to do so. The Strategy Guide also makes it clear that these are not rules and are not absolute.

The main thing we need to do is to make sure the antecedent is CLEAR. Often the antecedent is the SUBJECT of the sentence.

If you strip away the modifiers, this sentence reads:
Studios are attempting experiments to retain their status.

Here, the pronoun THEIR refers to the subject STUDIOS.