Corpora: apostrophe abuse

[Geoffrey Sampson]

I couldn't agree more about it being bizarre that the apostrophe is so widely
misused; but there is nothing specially American about this.  It is very
common indeed in Britain, and has been all my life.  Without ever having
gathered formal statistics, I would say purely from impressions that it is
by a wide margin the commonest clearcut punctuation error found in our
students' writing.

About five years ago I asked the question you have just asked on one of
the discussion lists -- I think not this Corpora List but perhaps the
Linguist List.  The rule seems simple, with one simple exception relating
to its/it's, so why do people constantly get it wrong?  Unfortunately I
can't readily locate the file of answers I received, but from memory there
was a point of view expressed in some of them which made me see the
situation rather differently.  What these respondents said was in essence
that I was focusing too much on the "core" use of apostrophe to mark
the genitive, and that its use was not as clearcut if one took into
account many forms that are normal in real-life writing though they don't
tend to crop up in linguistics textbook examples.  A case might be
"IOU's" as the plural of "IOU", where even educated writers would often
feel the need to insert an apostrophe to keep the acronym separate from
the inflexional ending -- or "1960's" for the years from 1960 to 1969.
Some editors would regard the latter as incorrect and substitute "1960s",
but I think quite a number of people and possibly some formal house
styles would prefer to include the apostrophe.  These are cases where
apostrophe-s is used to indicate plural and not genitive; there are obviously
other cases where it indicates omission of letters; and I think people
pointed to other cases again where it is used in further ways, though
I can't think of examples offhand.

The suggestion was that if one takes all these types of apostrophe into
account, then it is not so easy for someone to derive a simple rule from
real-life data, if he hasn't been formally taught the rule at school.
I wasn't sure whether I was convinced, but it did seem a better explanation
than anything I had been able to come up with for the observed fact's.

Best regards,


G.R. Sampson, Professor of Natural Language Computing

School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, GB

e-mail geoffs at cogs.susx.ac.uk
tel. +44 1273 678525
fax  +44 1273 671320
web http://www.grsampson.net