Jerry's the comedian wife

[ronbutters at AOL.COM]

Thanks, Arnold, for this definitive explication. The most important issue seems to be what else is going on in the discourse. The length of the phrase may marginally affect intelligibility. Otherwise, strong feelings one way or another are just a matter of taste--not surprising, because generally when the language offers speakers options, folks will try to come up with gross generalizations about the "meaning" and suitability of the variants (eg, "the passive is awkward," "pronouncing {-ing} as /-in/ is vulgar, etc )


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-----Original Message-----
From: "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>

Date:         Tue, 23 Oct 2007 16:52:54
To:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject:      Re: [ADS-L] Jerry's the comedian wife


On Oct 21, 2007, at 8:15 AM, Ron Butters wrote:

> ... MY aesthetic sense tells ME that neither "the comedian Jerry
> Seinfeld's wife" nor "Jerry Seinfeld the comedian's wife" is
> "awkward": they are far more elegant (and concise) than "the wife
> of the comedian Jerry Seinfeld."

there's a trade: the "group genitive" in -s is heavy on the left (and
gets heavier as the possessive NP gets longer), which can be harder
to process than the right-heavy of-genitive; but the of-genitive is a
bit longer (usually, two words: a "the" on the head N, plus the
"of").  if i remember the literature correctly, when the possessor NP
doesn't end in its head, the of-genitive (the more "analytic"
variant) is advancing at the expense of the group genitive (the more
"synthetic" variant), which is apparently not very frequent in this
configuration.

one result is that a few speakers now judge the group genitive in
this configuration to be, not merely awkward, but semantically ill-
formed (or ungrammatical).  see the example in this Language Log
posting of mine:

   AZ, 11/23/06: A friend of mine’s pet bear:  http://
itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003814.html

in this example, you can see another possible advantage of the group
genitive: since the possessor NP comes first, it's more easily
interpreted as topical or foregrounded.  "a friend of mine's pet
bear" foregrounds the friend; "the pet bear of a friend of mine"
foregrounds the bear.  so a lot depends on what's going on in the
discourse.

these group genitives aren't disappearing, but it looks like they're
becoming the marked variant, mostly used when they have some
advantage over the of-genitive.

(by the way, some usage advisers just *hate* chains of PPs -- as in
"the pet bear of a friend of mine" -- especially when they involve
more than one "of".)

arnold

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