In this second installment of “common mistakes”, let us focus on genitives.
1. What are they? 2. When should I use them? 3. How should I write them?
- What are genitives?
Genitives are one of the several ways in which a relationship between two (or more) nouns can be expressed. Genitives imply an apostrophe and sometimes the letter S, depending on the situation. In grammar books genitives are often coded as N’s + S
All the following are genitives:
The President’s daughters
A Hard Day’s Night
Keats’s poems
My grandparents’ cat
A friend of Tony’s (NB: technically, a friend of hers is also a genitive)
The driver’s seat
Two hours’ rest - When should I use them?
Students have a tendency to overuse genitives. They should really be reserved to a small number of cases :
- to express that someone possesses something: my parents’ flat
- for relations between people: Lynn’s sister, Ann’s girlfriend
- to express a close link between human institutions: our society’s problems, Manchester’s football teams, companies’ dividends
3. How should I write them?
The classical form is to add ‘s to the possessing item:
- when the noun finishes with a plural -s, do add ‘s: my parents’ flat
- when the noun finishes with an -s, but not a plural one, only add a ‘: Francis‘s dog
You can have complex constructions, with several genitives following each other: the girl’s cat’s tail
You can have a genitive relating to a full group of words: [the nice, brave, red-haired girl]‘s cat
Finally, be careful with determiners. The genitive takes the place of a determiner, and you can never have two determiners in a row:
the car of my parents => my parents’ car = their car
the docks of Liverpool => /!\ Liverpool’s docks /!\ => THE disappears.
You can find practice exercises here: https://www.englishexercises.org/makeagame/viewgame.asp?id=2452
What's the English for 