Oop's I did it again
Mark
asks why he can't say
Geoff Nunberg's
Peter Trudgill's headline.
More specifically, he notes that:
- The pattern (X's Y)'s Z is
unproblematic - famous examples would be His Master's Voice
and Her Majesty's Secret Service.
- Marcel
Gagne's User's Guide for Linux is also ok. That would be X's (Y's Z).
So what's wrong with
Geoff's Peter's
headline, which we can imagine being parsed like
Gagne's User's
Guide?
I guess it's just the same thing that's wrong with the unparsable
his
a headline. The possessive likes to take an expression that
picks out a property and can
function as a common noun, or at least an N' ("N-bar", things like
yellow
banana). Unfortunately
Peter
Trudgill's headline doesn't cut it as an N or an N' (
* a/the/every Peter
Trudgill's headline), whereas
user's guide
is a fantastic noun (
a/the/every
user's guide, not to be confused with the equally acceptable
a/the/every
users' guide.)
So it all seems very simple, modulo the fact that lots of people can't
figure out the standard use of 's in English - Google finds 118
occurrences of
Oop's I did it
again. (A use of
's
to mark the plural, plus reanalysis of
oops as the plural of
oop?)
However, the possessive construction is a slippery
creature: you have to watch
its
every move. Oop's.
Posted by David Beaver at April 15, 2004 04:47 AM