Re: a grammar question

Richard Wordingham wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...> wrote:
> > i18n@... wrote:
> > >
> > > Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> > > > This should be "Daniels's" (or, old-fashionedly, "Daniels'").
> > >
> > > Not picking on Peter personally here, but since his name is the example....
> > >
> > > Is there a reference for the "newfangled" usage? I rarely see it and
> > > always consider it incorrect, but I am willing to stand corrected....
> >
> > Chicago Manual of Style, at least since the 13th ed. Always use 's
> > except on names that end with the "eez" sound (Aristophanes') and a few
> > stereotyped cases -- in Jesus' name, for conscience' sake (I think there
> > are half a dozen exceptions).
>
> But there's another rule - don't add two adjacent {s} morphemes to a
> word - elide the second. For example, if one creates the phrase
> 'McDonalds it' to mean to eat as McDonalds, the third singular is
> 'McDonalds', not *McDonaldses. (The same sort of rule exists in
> Sanskrit.) A less slangy example is "It's the man who knows'
> responsibility.". (I suspect the Chicago Manual of Style would
> condemn this construction and recommend "It's the responsibility of
> the man who knows" instead.) The issue is then whether 'Daniels' is
> felt to contain the morpheme {s}; I think the answer is that sometimes
> it is and sometimes it isn't. I did some introspection and came to
> the conclusion that I would say "has's" rather than "has'", so for my
> speech one doesn't have to ponder the morphemic analysis of 'is'.

Be that as it may, the CMS rule for possessives is as I stated it. I
don't recall that it addresses the question of 3sg. verbs. (It may be in
the otiose chap. 5, which apparently was added to the 15th over the
objections of the Press's editorial staff.)

I wish I'd met Mrs. Turabian. She'd retired by the early 1970s, but I
knew Geoffrey Plampin, the U's dissertation secretary, who saw to it
that every dissertation and thesis adhered stringently to her rules.
(There was a cadre of typists who could prepare your final version and
see that it fit.) The rules, alas, were relaxed with word processing.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...