Who is admiring who?
August 13, 2011 1:12 AM   Subscribe

OK language mavens, help me understand this one. In this book review in today's NYT, we find the line "Mr. Kennedy is, deep down, an admirer of the president’s." Is the final 'apostrophe ess' a 'correct' construction?

What is the meaning being expressed here ... Obama admires Kennedy? Kennedy admires Obama?

Perhaps it should be "Mr. Kennedy is, deep down, an admiree of the president’s."
posted by woodblock100 to Writing & Language (46 answers total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
It could just as well be written "Mr. Kennedy is, deep down, the president's admirer." Another hint that that's the meaning is the following sentence about speaking for himself when he speaks about the reasons black people love the presided. So: Kennedy=admirer and Obama=admired.

To me, there doesn't seem to be anything weird about the original sentence.
posted by charmedimsure at 1:24 AM on August 13, 2011


What is the sentence before? Were they discussing philosophy or furniture. Mr Kennedy liked oak desks. Mr. Kennedy is, deep down, an admirer of the president’s.

But without a referent, we have a hanging possessive, and it is an error. It should say, Mr. Kennedy is, deep down, an admirer of the president.
posted by b33j at 1:26 AM on August 13, 2011 [9 favorites]


It seems like he's doubling up on possessive indicators. It could be "he is an admirer of the president" or "he is one of the president's admirers," but not both. It could work if it were referring to something from earlier ("Kennedy praises strong credentials, and he is an admirer of the president's," where "the president's credentials" is implied), but it doesn't look like that's what's going on, looking at the prior sentences.

There could be some idiosyncratic NYT style rule at play, but I'd call it a typo, myself.
posted by Rhaomi at 1:33 AM on August 13, 2011


Response by poster: There is no sentence before, as this begins a paragraph. And the immediate following sentence - a parenthetical aside - seems to imply that it is Obama admiring Mr. Kennedy: "(Mr. Obama, a Harvard Law graduate, signed up for, but did not ultimately take, one of Mr. Kennedy’s courses.) "
posted by woodblock100 at 1:33 AM on August 13, 2011


Although, thinking more about it, this does seem to crop up colloquially. Like if you mention a musician I like and I say "I'm a big fan of his" instead of "I'm a big fan of him." The apostrophe-s on president feels like an extension of that. I'm not sure if it's grammatically correct, though. There's some discussion on the topic here and here.
posted by Rhaomi at 1:37 AM on August 13, 2011 [1 favorite]


"Mr. Kennedy is, deep down, an admirer of the president’s."

Try, "Mr. Kennedy is, deep down, one of the president's admirers"

Equate the two, and the apostrophe isn't so weird.
posted by smcameron at 1:39 AM on August 13, 2011 [1 favorite]


Eh? Incorrect is incorrect. It's a different part of speech!
posted by Justinian at 1:41 AM on August 13, 2011


It is not fundamentally incorrect. Consider:

He is among Joe's team mates. He is a team mate of Joe's.
He is among my admirer's. He is one admirer of mine.


The possessive works well in these sentences. I would not have said, "he is a team mate of Joe."

By extension, "an admirer of the president's" should equate to "one of the president's admirers." However, just because something is technically correct does not mean that it isn't awkward. It's poor style and should have been phrased differently.
posted by wjm at 1:45 AM on August 13, 2011


Let's say Steve lent a book to someone, the book would be, "Steve's book" and also "a book of Steve's", (and not "a book of Steve").
posted by smcameron at 1:47 AM on August 13, 2011 [1 favorite]


I understand that's what the sentence means, but that's not how it is constructed in English. "A lover of music". "An admirer of beauty". "A fan of the opera".
posted by Justinian at 1:52 AM on August 13, 2011


Response by poster: He is among my admirer's. ... The possessive works well in these sentences.

I'm sorry, but I don't think this is correct. The 's' in that sentence is indicating plural, not possession, and no apostrophe is required.
posted by woodblock100 at 1:57 AM on August 13, 2011 [3 favorites]


Best answer: This is a double genitive (or double possessive), which is questionable but not necessarily incorrect. I feel guilty quoting Wikipedia, but it gives the example "a picture of the king’s (that is, a picture owned by the king, as distinguished from a picture of the king, one in which the king is portrayed)" and goes on to say "some writers regard this as a questionable usage,[4] although it has a history in careful English."

Here's the article cited by Wikipedia. The most relevant paragraph is probably this one:

But there are some limitations. The phrase has to be indefinite — “a friend of Pope’s” is OK, but if I meant a particular one I would have had to write “the friend of Pope” or “Pope’s friend”; also, “a friend of ours” is idiomatic, but not “the friends of ours”, which would have to recast as “our friends”. And the second noun must be human, or at least animate, and also definite — so you can’t say “a friend of the British Library’s” or “a lover of the furniture’s”.
posted by bibliophibianj at 2:09 AM on August 13, 2011 [13 favorites]


bibliophibianj has it
posted by Joseph Gurl at 2:33 AM on August 13, 2011


To this Brit it looks wierd and reads awkwardly. And why is President not capitalised?

"the President's admirer" or "an admirer of the President" are both unambiguous and more natural IMHO. The tortuous and contrived justifications for the passage as written do not convince. I'd call this a proof reading fail or a simple typo.
posted by epo at 4:29 AM on August 13, 2011


The man who wrote the passage (also British) would agree with you, epo, because in the NY Times example admirer refers to a particular admirer. I just wanted to share the whole thing to point out that there's still ambiguity about it, and that's why it might have slipped past the editor.
posted by bibliophibianj at 5:01 AM on August 13, 2011


Plural? How many presidents are being discussed in the piece? Seems like only one, Pres. Obama.
posted by gjc at 5:04 AM on August 13, 2011


Response by poster: Plural?

When I mentioned plural, I wasn't talking about the original NYT quote, but the example given in this comment. Sorry for any confusion ...
posted by woodblock100 at 5:28 AM on August 13, 2011


Best answer: > But without a referent, we have a hanging possessive, and it is an error. It should say, Mr. Kennedy is, deep down, an admirer of the president.

This is not true (nor are similar later comments like "he's doubling up on possessive indicators"). English, like language in general, is not a sub-branch of logic. "An admirer of his/the president's" is perfectly good English and has been common usage for centuries. Of course, if it sounds wrong to you at a gut level ("That sounds weird to me and I would never say it" versus "I hear that all the time and maybe god forbid I've actually said it myself but logic tells me it's wrong so I must chastise it"), then it's not part of your dialect, and that's fine, but your dialect is not coextensive with the English language.
posted by languagehat at 5:35 AM on August 13, 2011 [9 favorites]


IINAS (I am not a syntactician).

Language Log has held forth, albeit somewhat briefly, on double genitives. Here is an academic paper on the the topic (links to a PDF).

For what it's worth, my intuition* is that it's perfectly grammatical, and not even quite as limited as bibliophibianj's quoted paragraph suggests: the definiteness restriction doesn't appear to hold in all cases ("That friend of Jane's who picked me up at the airport was so nice" sounds fine). I haven't read the linked paper yet; probably it covers this.

*Disclaimer: it has been suggested that the intuitions of linguists differ from those of nonlinguists...

And languagehat is, of course, right on the money about the principle of the thing.
posted by ootandaboot at 6:10 AM on August 13, 2011 [2 favorites]


Mr. Kennedy is, deep down, an admirer of the president.

That's what would seem correct to me. Unless it was talking about something that the president owned.
posted by sully75 at 6:10 AM on August 13, 2011


The way i reason it out to make sure it's right is to think about the different cases: third, second, first person:

He is an admirer of Obama's (not "of Obama")

He is an admirer of yours (not "of you")

He is an admirer of mine (not "of me")

To me, the parenthesized cases all sound more awkward.
posted by supercres at 6:44 AM on August 13, 2011 [2 favorites]


(It becomes more obvious to me if one replaces "admirer" with "friend".)
posted by supercres at 6:48 AM on August 13, 2011 [1 favorite]


This is not true (nor are similar later comments like "he's doubling up on possessive indicators").

Then can you please explain precisely what the noun is possessing? Because that's an apostrophe. Either the noun is a contraction (an admirer of the president is)—I think you would agree that's highly unlikely—or the noun is possessive. Possessive of what? Unless we're talking about something in an earlier sentence, as b33j points out. But standing on its own, it's wrong.

You can't just make up arbitrary rules and then wave your hands around and say "It's CULTURE! I WIN!" Language has rules, even bastard languages like English. If this is some well-agreed-upon exception to the rule, I think we're going to see a little more evidence than your username.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 6:48 AM on August 13, 2011


Here's the thing. It's not a possessive adjective. It refers to a group of admirers, and Kennedy is one of that group. My analogous examples above use "mine" and not "my". The use of "the president's" in the OP is analogous to that in the following exchange:

"Whose admirers are these?"
"Well, those three are mine, these five are yours, and those six all the way over there are the president's."

I guess it's just leaving off an understood "admirers". You're arguing "The president's WHAT?" The answer is understood. Leaving off the apostrophe-s would not be correct.

You would probably consider it correct to say, "He is one of the president's admirers." ("president's admirers" being a set of people, and he is one of them.)

It would be correct (but redundant) to say, "He is an admirer of the president's admirers." The last word is dropped as understood.

...

Here's the test: would you say "Kennedy is a friend of his" or "Kennedy is a friend of him"? Anyone who says "Drop the apostrophe-S" is arguing for the latter.
posted by supercres at 7:03 AM on August 13, 2011


Civil_disobedient, I think you should read up on prescriptivism vs descriptivism.

In the descriptivist approach, what is "correct" in a language or dialect is what a competent speaker of tht language considers normal usage. There is no need for internal logic; what's right is what people use.

In this case, it's clear that at least in some dialects of English, there are analogous constructions, such as "he is a friend of mine.". For example, in my dialect of English (I'm American and grew up in the Western US), the OP's phrase sounds just fine. So would "an admirer of the President", although to me that has a slightly different feel.
Thus, because the phrase is considered acceptable by a group of native speakers, the descriptivist approach says that the construction is acceptable, end of discussion.

Whether it's good style is a different discussion.
posted by nat at 7:12 AM on August 13, 2011


Then can you please explain precisely what the noun is possessing?

Isn't "president" possessing "admirer"?

If you were to say "one of the president's admirers", then "president" is possessing "admirers".
Does that part seem right to you?



You can't just make up arbitrary rules and then wave your hands around and say "It's CULTURE! I WIN!" Language has rules, even bastard languages like English. If this is some well-agreed-upon exception to the rule, I think we're going to see a little more evidence than your username.


Both As bibliophibianj and ootandaboot have indicated the well-agreed-upon exception, and pointed to sources describing it. It is called a "double genitive" or double possessive. Do those posts not seem right to you? Langaugehat seems to agree with them.
posted by ManInSuit at 7:16 AM on August 13, 2011


It would be correct (but redundant) to say, "He is an admirer of the president's admirers." The last word is dropped as understood.

Sorry. That would be an unintentional change in meaning, and I didn't realize it until after I submitted. "The president's admirers" is a group of people. I'm arguing that the original sentence had the structure "[PERSON] is [MEMBER] of [GROUP]".

[GROUP] is "the president's admirers". [MEMBER] would be what each person in that group is called; it would be "an admirer". That's what I was trying to get across.
posted by supercres at 7:17 AM on August 13, 2011


The funny thing is, I'm one of the biggest prescriptivists I know. (End BTQ abuse!) That's why this riles me up so much. The original sentence follows the rules, the way I see it, and isn't just correct because "that's how people say it".
posted by supercres at 7:20 AM on August 13, 2011 [1 favorite]


Well, people don't say it that way, because it's confusing. It makes you wonder what was left off: "Mr. Kennedy is, deep down, an admirer of the president’s ____" Policy? Wife? Suit? Lawnmower?

I'd say "Mr. Kennedy is, deep down, an admirer of the president" but "Mr. Kennedy is, deep down, among the president's admirers" is fine. As it stands, it's at least awkward, if not wrong.

But why do we believe it's not technically wrong again? This page (just the very first reference I looked at, because I'm lazy today) says this:
Note also that, if the phrase already contains the words of or for to show possession, one does not add the possessive 's or apostrophe ending. For instance, if one writes, "The names of the two dogs are Ralph and George," one does not need an apostrophe on or in the word dogs. The phrase "of the two dogs" already states the possession. The word dogs is not possessive but a simple plural. Grammatically, it is the object of the preposition of, and, as such, it is not possessive.

posted by taz at 7:56 AM on August 13, 2011


Google returns 6.6M hits for "friend of the president's" and 32.4M hits for "friend of the president", which is consistent with the discussion here... the latter seems more "standard" but the former is not uncommon.

I doubt the author meant to write "president's", but I think it would sound perfectly acceptable and normal in spoken English to all but the most opinionated prescriptivists.
posted by deadweightloss at 7:57 AM on August 13, 2011


ootandaboot linked to a discussion of this construction on Language Log, a group linguistics blog. The article quotes Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage and the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, both of which endorse it. Merriam-Webster's goes into the history of the construction a bit, as well as the controversy about it, and the quoted bit from the CGEL outlines cases where the construction is and isn't used.

I'd recommend reading it.

This construction seems to be very well established, and I don't think people endorsing the construction, either here or in two widely used style guides, are making stuff up, even though some people don't use it, and it sounds funny to them.

(Personally, I rarely use this construction except with possessive pronouns, but I see and hear it often enough that it doesn't sound funny to me.)
posted by nangar at 8:09 AM on August 13, 2011 [1 favorite]


deadweightloss, a lot of those hits for "friend of the president's" are like these I found in the returns: a close friend of the President's wife; a friend of the president's parents; also a good friend of the president's chief of staff ; a close friend of the president's White House secretaries; I write this as a friend of the President's soul; a school friend of the President's daughter; etc.

I think the actual number of constructions like the one we're talking about will be much smaller.
posted by taz at 8:22 AM on August 13, 2011


taz, that's a good catch. I tried excluding all pages that mention the words "wife", "mother", "aide" "secretary", etc, and got about 800K hits. Maybe not as common as I thought... still, publications that have used OP's exact construction include the NY Times, NPR, Breitbart, Smithsonian Magazine, US News, Financial Times, AFP, and Time (just to pick out the first few I found).
posted by deadweightloss at 8:58 AM on August 13, 2011


Sounds fine to me. It's not saying he is an admirer of the president, but rather that the president has many admirers, of which, Mr. Kennedy is one.

Maybe it's just a dialectical thing. (I'm a native California English speaker.) I wouldn't bat an eye at, "Who is that?" "Oh, this is a friend of John's."
posted by losvedir at 9:47 AM on August 13, 2011


Actually, on second thought, does anyone have a problem with the following sentences?

This is my book. This is a book of mine.

Similarly:

I have a secret admirer. She is a secret admirer of mine.

Lastly, mine -> the president's (motivation: "Whose book is this? It's mine. No, wait, it's the president's.") So we have:

He is an admirer of the president's.
posted by losvedir at 9:51 AM on August 13, 2011


Interesting. Fowler's Modern English Usage finds examples of the double possessive as far back as the 14th Century - Chaucer, no less; summarises the "rules" for its use much as Bibliophibianj has done above (in fact, I think Fowler must be the ultimate source of the WP article); and concludes "It is not easy to explain why such constructions are idiomatic: one can only assert that they are."
posted by genesta at 10:01 AM on August 13, 2011


I have a guess as to why some people are having trouble seeing the posted sentence, whether intentional or not, as correct.

For first person singular, there's a specific word available to use in situations like this: mine. Not "my". Same with other tenses: hers/theirs/yours, rather than her/their/your. (Not "his" though.) So all of these work well, right?

Kennedy is an admirer of mine.
Kennedy is an admirer of yours.
Kennedy is an admirer of hers.
Kennedy is an admirer of theirs.


These are ambiguous:

Kennedy is an admirer of his. (Just "his"... or "his" what?)
Kennedy is an admirer of the president's. (Just "the president's"... or "the president's" what?)


I think if the first four are valid (sources cited point to "yes"), the last two are as well, though they are more ambiguous.
posted by supercres at 11:44 AM on August 13, 2011


Best answer: Civil_Disobedient, I agree with you completely: language has rules! Yes. Definitely.

The thing is, the rules of any given language are very, very complicated. So complicated, in fact, that there's a whole field of study dedicated to the task of figuring out the facts of the rules accurately, and then figuring out what the underlying logic of the rules is. That field is, of course, linguistics (well, linguistics is broader than that, but this is one of its central goals). I think that if you started looking closely enough at the rules of English, you'd find that many things that you accept as being fully within the rules can't actually be explained by someone sitting down and applying the rules of logic for a few minutes. A random example off the top of my head:

a. "I want to go to the store."
b. "I don't want to go to the store."
c. "I should go to the store."
d. "I shouldn't go to the store."

I can already see two issues in this set of sentences that straightforward reasoning won't give me an explanation for. Why do you have to use "to" after "want" in (a), but don't have to use "to" after "should" in (c)? What's the difference between "want" and "should"?

And when you make the (a) negative in (b), where does this "don't" thing come from? Why can't you do what you do when you make (c) negative in (d), which is stick the negation on to the verb? When the thing you're negating is the verb "want", it doesn't make any sense to stick the negation somewhere else! And it's totally inconsistent to sometimes have negation coming before the verb and sometimes coming after!

And yet I would be very surprised (and, um, possibly want to come interview you and write a paper about it) if you suggested that "I want not [or wantn't] to go to the store" is better than "I don't want to go to the store". Yes, I know there's a reading where the thing you want is to not go to the store. But that's a different sentence.

Ok, so now we've dispensed with the idea that you should be able to figure out off the top of your head why English sentences are the way they are. That's not to say grammar can never be figured out, but it often takes a lot of accumulation of facts and a lot of theoretical structure to be able to explain the certain type of logic underlying the rules of language. Professional linguists work on these problems all day long, every day. I'm not saying you have to kowtow to their expertise (heck, I can think of plenty of professional linguists who I disagree with about plenty of things, and I'm just a young linguist-in-training) but I am saying you might want to carefully consider what they have to say and understand the evidence and arguments at hand instead of rejecting them just because at first glance something doesn't make sense to you. The actual evidence being summoned in this thread (for example, the academic paper I cited above, Storto 2000, which comes from an author who I don't know personally but who, I am quite certain, believes strongly that language has rules) indicates that the double genitive is well within the rules of mainstream standard written English and has been in existence for centuries (thanks for pointing that out, genesta). This in turn suggests that the original NYT writer most certainly intended to use it.

The funny thing is that people are asking a "what's the logic here" sort of question that I think actually can be answered pretty straightforwardly. What is the president possessing? An admirer. Obama has an admirer. That admirer is Kennedy. (This answers the second question stated by the OP).

No one has a problem with "the president's admirer", right? 'Apostrophe-ess' (as the OP puts it) can definitely mean that something is possessive. The issue that people are getting hung up on (as far as I can tell) is that "of" is another way of conveying that something is possessive, as in "the indifference of the federal government" (if you're interested in the relationship between these two alternative ways of showing possession, check out the abstract I just borrowed that quote from for a brief overview and a list of sources). So if one was particularly averse to the notion of redundancy, one might think that the 'apostrophe-ess' must be doing some other work in the sentence "an admirer of the president's" because the "of" already conveyed the possessive relationship.

Well, leaving aside the obvious fact that language is chock-full of redundancy (such as negative concord...in fact, my first thought was that maybe the double genitive could be analyzed as an agreement phenomenon), it turns out that the paper I cited above (which I've now read) actually argues that the construction is not redundant. It does entertain the idea that it might simply be redundant (the author calls this the "pleonastic genitive hypothesis"). But instead it argues that the "of" here is not the genitive (possessive) "of" but rather the partitive "of". Partitive "of" is the one you find in constructions like "many of them". So to try to put an intuitive spin on a complex theoretical argument that I don't even quite fully follow myself (definitely not a semanticist), I believe the paper is saying that "an admirer of the president's" means something like "the president has multiple admirers [with possession expressed through the apostrophe-ess] and Kennedy is one of them [with partitivity expressed through "of"].

So. If you feel strongly that language has rules, and find those rules interesting, and want to know more about them and how they work in the particular case of the double genitive, I would suggest taking a look at Storto 2000 (PDF) and perhaps the references within (like Barker 1998 and Zamparelli 1998, also both PDFs). Note that when the author puts an asterisk before an example sentence it is to indicate ungrammaticality (that is, sentences that are not within the rules).
posted by ootandaboot at 12:02 PM on August 13, 2011 [8 favorites]


One final point: Taz, you don't seem to have read the webpage you linked to quite thoroughly enough. The paragraph you quote has the following footnote at the bottom of the page:
There are some exceptions. Of plus a possessive noun may be necessary to show a difference in meaning. "A picture of Mary" has one meaning (a picture that shows Mary); "A picture of Mary's" has another (a picture owned by or created by Mary). We should also observe that possessive pronouns are idiomatically used after of – "a friend of his," not "a friend of him"; "an acquaintance of theirs," not "an acquaintance of them."
Note that when this author contrasts "A picture of Mary" with "A picture of Mary's", the one with the double genitive is actually the one that has the possessive meaning in it ("a picture owned by or created by Mary").

In the original paragraph you cited, the author is specifically cautioning against using an apostrophe with "dogs" in "The name of the two dogs are Ralph and George". Note that no one, descriptivist or prescriptivist, would ever advocate putting an apostrophe there. It's not an example of the same type. And you know why I bet that is? Because this time there's no partitive semantics -- the "of" here really is a genitive "of", not a partitive one.
posted by ootandaboot at 1:07 PM on August 13, 2011


Actually, I did see that... but it says this is an exception – to show a difference in meaning.

By which I take it to mean that we would not say

a poster of the man's when we mean the man's poster

but we might say

a poster of the actor's when we mean a poster belonging to the actor, as opposed to a poster with an image of the actor on it.
posted by taz at 2:01 PM on August 13, 2011


I concede - the explanations since are very clear, and I am wrong in my earlier statement.
posted by b33j at 2:30 PM on August 13, 2011


Taz, yes, I agree that the author might intend to imply that you can only use a double genitive when there is a contrast to be created. But I think the author is not thinking entirely clearly about this issue, and recognizes that "a picture of Mary's" is perfectly grammatical but is uneasy about how that relates to his/her previous statement to not use a possessive noun when you've already used "of". Therefore he/she casts it as "an exception" in a way that implies that what makes the "exception" ok is that there's some semantic contrast to be created with the non-double-genitive. The double genitive is an exception to the "rule" to not use a possessive noun when you've already used "of", so what the author says can be taken to mean something that I would consider pretty accurate. The thing is that that "rule" is just a piece of explanatory guidance that has been stated overly broadly, and that's why you end up needing to make exceptions for things like double genitives. Double genitives are structurally and semantically different from the cases that that guidance was originally intended to apply to, the case of "The names of the dogs are Ralph and George." But if you didn't recognize that at first glance, and just see the superficial similarities (there's an "of"!), it seems like there's something confusing going on and so you might set about to explain it. What you'd end up with is a post-hoc and muddled account like "It's ok so long as there's a contrast!".

Note, though, that the author never takes an actual stance on the acceptability of "a poster of the man's" -- while I sense the same implication you obviously did, it's only an implication. The cases that the author makes some statement about are: 1) the dogs (not a possible double genitive environment in anyone's view), 2) Mary and the pictures (where there's allegedly contrast to be made and thus the double genitive is ok), and 3) cases with possessive pronouns after "of" (which I don't think anyone suggests are not ok). The case of sentences that are structurally equivalent to Mary and her pictures, but which are supposed to lack the possible contrast, aren't addressed directly.

The example about a poster of the man doesn't meet the criterion of lacking a possible contrast. You claim we wouldn't say "a poster of the man's" when we mean "the man's poster". Now, I think "a poster of the man's" sounds fine, but it doesn't mean "the man's poster" since it's indefinite (it means "one of the man's posters") More importantly, though, if you say "a poster of the man" it's a perfectly grammatical and understandable construction that means "a poster with the man on it" (If anything, you might want to wonder why it seems more likely to mean that than "a poster belonging to the man"...but that's a topic for another AskMe). You might not know who that man is but that doesn't stop you from processing what the sentence means. The only difference from the actor case is that you're more likely to be talking about posters with actors on them than posters with random men in them -- but that doesn't affect whether sentences are grammatical or not, and anyhow it's certainly not impossible for you to be talking about a poster featuring a man of unknown origin. So in that example there is also a contrast that can be created by using the double genitive! Saying that the potential contrast makes the double genitive ok is getting it backwards -- rather, because the double genitive is grammatical, you can end up with contrasts between it and other constructions.
posted by ootandaboot at 3:08 PM on August 13, 2011


So all these are fine then:

the voice of the people's

the hopes of a nation's

the hair of the girl's

or am I missing something? (very, very likely – because it's late for me, and the parsing ability of my brain's is not so great)
posted by taz at 3:53 PM on August 13, 2011


Those examples are ungrammatical because you've switched to using definite nouns (with "the" instead of "a"). The double genitive disallows definites unless there's additional modification (if you want to know why, you're going to have to consult the literature yourself, because I don't think I understand it well enough to explain it). So:

I met one of John's friends. GOOD
I met the one of John's friends. BAD
I met the one of John's friends that you pointed out last night. GOOD

I met a friend of John's. GOOD
I met the friend of John's. BAD
I met the friend of John's that you pointed out last night. GOOD

I got these examples from the Barker 1998 paper that I linked above.

The examples you gave are quite hard to make into natural-sounding indefinites, but if you do take the indefinite equivalent they should become grammatical. Let's see....how about:

"While investigating the kidnapping of little Susie, the detective was delighted to find that a hair of the girl's had gotten caught on the fence." (this one's good because it's indefinite)

or

"While investigating the kidnapping of little Susie, the detective was delighted to find the hair of the girl's that had gotten caught on the fence." (this one's good because it's been further modified with the relative clause)
posted by ootandaboot at 4:37 PM on August 13, 2011 [1 favorite]


Mod note: Okay, that's a really good example, and I'm now totally seeing how this construction works in instances where there is that one particular thing among many belonging to someone, about which there is something specific to say.

I would still find "The detective was delighted to find a hair of the girl's" full stop very bizarre, and I still think "an admirer of the president's" as used in the review is incredibly clunky, and I don't understand the choice. I wonder if it was indeed very specific to make some point (I'm pretty sure no one thinks Obama possesses only one admirer), or just offhand? At any rate, thanks for the explanation, ootandaboot. I hope the detective finds the girl!
posted by taz (staff) at 11:30 PM on August 13, 2011


Glad I could help clarify. I'm obviously somewhat over-fond of talking about language.

I still think "an admirer of the president's" as used in the review is incredibly clunky

Well, now we're into matters of pure taste, where theoretical linguistics will help us no more :)
posted by ootandaboot at 7:47 AM on August 14, 2011


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