'Nother blend (or, telling on myself)

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated > Wed, 21 Jul 2004 07:21:45 -0400,
>  David Bowie <db.list at PMPKN.NET> wrote:
>
> I *do* think, though, that there's a difference between
>
>  (1) I've got more than one day's of clean clothes
>
> and either of
>
>  (2) I've got more than two days' of clean clothes
>  (3) I've got more than two days of clean clothes
>
> Whereas--purely from personal intuitions here--(2) and (3) are both
> perfectly acceptable, (1) is at best questionable to me, and if i were
> marking sentences as grammatical or not for a theoretical syntactic study, i
> would probably give (1) a full asterisk.

The reason you don't accept (1) is quite simple:  It sounds like one is
saying "one days", that is a plural noun preceded by a singular adjective, which is
a grammatical error.

        - "James Allan Landau-Landau"  (that's how my name appears on my
birth certificate!)