this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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So "'s" is what's called a "clitic". It's a tiny little piece of meaning that can't stand by itself and has to "lean" on a neighboring thing to be grammatical.
The interesting thing is that their distribution is syntactic, not morphological. So, instead of attaching to a word, like affixes do, "'s" instead attaches to entire noun phrases. This includes all adjectives, prepositional phrases, and even subordinate clauses, as long as they're part of the possessor noun phrase.
So, "the dude's car"? Perfectly fine, and it even looks like an affix here. "The dude over there's car"? Perfectly fine. "The dude I went to school with but who forgot that he ate a capybara yesterday's car"? Perfectly grammatical in English thanks to the power of clitics.
Bonus fun fact: "'s" used to actually be a suffix, but somehow became separated over time, and it's a big deal in diachronic syntactic theory, because things are only ever supposed to evolve toward being a suffix, but "'s" is one of the few things that seems like it evolved the other way, which throws a wrench into how we usually view the process (called "grammaticalization").
In short, Anon's sentence is a perfectly cromulent use of the English language.
Where is the subscribe button for more linguistics facts?
Pretty interesting read for a non native speaker, i got to say. Thanks.
Pretty interesting read for a native speaker, even.
You can also think of the phrase as replacing the name of the subject of the sentence that we're trying to say has possession of something. Like a pronoun. So,
Could be better conceptualized as:
Thats actually a good help for me as a german because some people do talk like that. They would say something like "That is peter his car" Instead of "That is peter's car" (But in german you would skip the ' )
I was under the impression that such a phrase should be hyphenated in order to use the clitic with it, such as "the-individual-I-spotted's face".
Possibly - I wouldn't really know. Writing isn't language, and written English's "rules" are subjective and largely arbitrary, so I don't worry about them very much.