Plural Possessives

First, let's get my grammar quiz result out of the way:

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

(How could it be otherwise?)

For all its flaws, this quiz, question #7 in particular, got me thinking about the English plural and possessive suffixs -s/-es and -'s.

First, the facts—and by facts, I mean my grammaticality judgments, untested and unscientific.

On singular nouns, I pronounce -'s as [əz] after an alveolar fricative (e.g. Chris's, rose's), as [s] after other voiceless consonants (e.g. truck's), and as [z] after other voiced consonants and vowels (e.g. dog's, Ann's, Mary's).

Interestingly, this is the same pronunciation of the plural morpheme -s/-es, although we spell them differently. So what happens when both the plural and possessive morphemes are attached to a word (as I did all through this previous post with heptapods')? For the plural-possessive of dog, I say [dagz], not [dagzəz], and for the plural-possessive of truck I say [trʌks], not [trʌksəz].

This strikes me as odd. The two morphemes may have identical pronunciations, but they clearly have different meanings, so it can't be that they're actually the same morpheme (can it?). Still, for some reason they refuse to co-occur. This is especially odd because the possessive morpheme actually attaches to phrases, not words: it's the King of England's wife not * the King's of England wife. This gives us a chance to see if the plural and possessive morphemes will co-occur when they're not right on top of each other. For me, they still can't: I cannot rephrase the wives of the Kings of England as * the Kings of England's wives, although I admit I'm out at the bleeding edge of grammaticality judgments here—the version with of sounds so much better, probably because it isn't ambiguous between plural and possessive, that I'd certainly use it for clarity.

So, apparently the English plural and possessive morphemes, which are homophonous but which certainly have different meanings and distributions, cannot co-occur on the same noun phrase head, even if they would not be adjacent. Maybe the reason is that the plural morpheme is really a singular plural morpheme—that is, it's meaning only works on singular nouns. Or maybe the reason is "languages are irregular".

[Aside: I'm sure I'm not the first person to notice and describe these facts. If I'm recapitulating someone's famous argument without giving credit, then this humble blogger craves the favor of forgiveness.]

[Now playing: "Cliffs" by Aphex Twin]

Comments

[wolfangel]

I believe Judy Bernstein has done work on this. I actually can have them co-occur, though I know I'm in the far minority.

What about something like "the members of parliament's votes", which sounds fine to me (but then it should)?

[The Tensor]

Hmm, "the members of parliament's votes" doesn't sound quite right to me, but it's not awful like "the Kings of England's wives". However, I think I've reached the point where, having thought about this issue analytically, all of my grammaticality judgments are suspect, especially the fine distinctions.