Corpora: Apostrophes

[Simon G. J. Smith]

I suppose when I referred to the status of 1L and 2L English I was thinking more of the language itself than its orthographical representation, but it certainly is interesting that native writers cannot agree on apostrophe/letter "s" usage. I went to a school called Lord Williams's School (founded by one Lord Williams), and it was drummed into us time and time again that the school's name should be spelt that way because Williams is a singular form. Now, though, I regularly read to my son from a book called "Thomas' Train" (of tank engine fame). If I were guided by the pronunciation, I would write "Lord Williams' School" and "Thomas's train"; so presumably pronunciation has nothing to do with it, and the alternatives are in arbitrary free variation.

In Great Britain, there is a chain store called Currys and another called Sainsbury's. As far as I can see, both these names reflect some sort of possession or attribution, yet in one of the cases the apostrophe is not used.

I have an idea about which of the 4 cited examples I would recommend in an EFL classroom, but I certainly wouldn't want to suggest the others were *wrong*. It seems that the correct use of the apostrophe, in British English at least, is not as cut and dried as one might suppose, so perhaps it is not surprising that people do sometimes make mistakes. We manage quite satisfactorily without the apostrophe in speech, since it serves no disambiguating function; I expect eventually it will simply slip out of use.

By the way, has anyone conducted overuse/underuse studies on the morpheme represented by 's? I think I've observed that speakers of languages with an attributive particle (like Japanese "no" or Mandarin "de") which can sometimes be directly translated as 's tend to use that construction; in some such cases I think a native speaker would prefer a noun compound. Annoyingly, though, I can't think of a convincing example.